Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It has some familiar features of the postapocalyptic — ruined, smoking landscapes; busted industrial cityscapes; giant mines filled with faceless, chanting hordes à la Mad Max: Fury Road — crossed with elements of medieval fantasy. But there are also cowboys and witches and werewolves and giant skeleton monsters. And while that combination is intriguing, what’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene. There’s a bit of video-game fantasy to all this as well, but what’s onscreen here is a lot more transporting and feels older, more elemental. Each shot looks like a page out of a cursed tome of twisted, postmodern fairy tales, the images forbidding and slightly abstract. This odd, distanced atmosphere is intentional. Anderson regularly cuts to a map showing us where the characters are on their journey — a device he also used in the Resident Evil movies — and he keeps time via an onscreen steampunk watch face that tells us how long it will be until the next full moon. The whole thing is marvelously unreal. You might find yourself wanting to lose yourself in it.
It’s also somewhat uncharacteristic for this filmmaker. Anderson loves visceral, gut-punch action, and in the past he’s brought to fairly generic stories an invigorating sense of menace and savagery. The Resident Evil films aren’t just filled with screeching zombies, they’re also filled with lasers that turn characters into piles of stew meat; the sci-fi thriller Event Horizon (1997) offers gory glimpses into a hellish dimension that I still haven’t been able to shake 28 years later; his 2014 disaster film Pompeii might look like a prestige period piece from the outside, but it’s also distinguished by the sadistic glee with which the director obliterates all his characters and locations. To some critics, these are knocks against Anderson’s work — his Tomatometer scores are famously in the toilet — but I find his movies a lot more cathartic and effective than the tasteful violence of so many antiseptic modern blockbusters. Some will consider this blasphemy, but he reminds me of Samuel Fuller in his directness and his no-nonsense willingness to just show us stuff.
In the Lost Lands has plenty of fighting, but its picture-book precision, its almost hand-drawn quality, tempers the cruelty, at least a little bit. It’s a classic quest story, following a lonely and powerful witch, Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich, the director’s wife and muse), known for her ability to grant any wish. “I refuse no one,” she mutters with melancholy eyes and gritted teeth, suggesting that once granted, the wishes will lead to more sadness and catastrophe. In the City Under the Mountain, evidently the lone enclave on Earth where humans still live, the Queen (Amara Okereke) comes to Gray Alys and asks to be given the power of a werewolf. Then the Queen’s loyal guard and lover Jerais (Simon Lööf) secretly comes and asks that the Queen fail in her request. Gray Alys accepts both wishes and sets off to find a man to guide her through the Lost Lands, a blasted netherworld where she hopes to locate the werewolf. She enlists the aid of a quiet, cowboy-like mercenary named Boyce (Dave Bautista), who has a Sergio Leone sneer and a gun that shoots out snakes. (Cinema!) They’re pursued by a group of modern-day Crusader knights led by the Enforcer (Arly Jover), who is in service to the Patriarch (Fraser James), a backstabbing church leader who seeks to unseat the Queen.
Why? I’m not entirely sure. The vaguely byzantine court intrigue is secondary to Gray Alys and Boyce’s relationship, which the film builds patiently and methodically — even at the expense sometimes of the action scenes, some of which probably go by too quickly. (One particularly climactic set piece looks fantastic but also feels like it’s over before it even starts.) Partly it’s because Anderson is more interested in the growing bond between Gray Alys and Boyce. Partly I suspect it’s because he doesn’t have James Cameron or Tom Cruise money to spend on intricate and expansive action scenes. Somehow, though, it all makes sense within the composed, fairy-tale simplicity of this world.
The mood conjured by Gray Alys and Boyce’s journey is a queasy one, in keeping with the hybrid nature of the setting. Quest narratives tend to be powered by a sense of hope, of anticipation — the characters are usually looking for an object they care deeply about, or that will save them or their friends. But here are two sad, lonely, distrustful souls, searching for something neither of them really wants, through the destroyed remains of our planet, all while being chased by a weird army of modern-day knights controlled by a kingdom mired in betrayal. Everything in this movie is so hilariously bleak — but that somehow makes us more receptive to the derelict beauty of its universe, where it’s always night or dusk, and where everything is ruined but nothing seems impossible. We lose ourselves amid the haunted railways and moonlight monsters, the busted reactors and flaming hills and rivers overflowing with skulls. It’s all so metal it hurts.