Sometimes a film comes along that reminds you why you shouldn’t go to Coachella, Burning Man or any kind of rave-adjacent event filled with Gen Z kids or millennials. Not that this dystopian, near-future road movie is actually set during a music festival. It’s more like the sort of fare that might be projected in a movie tent at such an event, where people coming down off a bad dose of Molly lie about hoping the throbbing will stop soon. Unfortunately, this movie is the throbbing.
The ostensible plot concerns some kind of pandemic knocking about (get ready for scads of movies with this theme coming out over the next few years) and rangy protagonist Blake (Sam Quartin) is worried she may have been infected by her greasy boyfriend Cole (Max Madsen). Nevertheless, her plan is to rob a drugstore to liberate a life-saving drug and pass it on to some kind of underground health maintenance organisation to save other people’s lives – as if Occupy ran Obamacare, maybe.
But Cole ditches her and she’s left with a young friend named Bobby (Nekhebet Kum Juch) who lost her voice. Blake and Bobby eventually meet up with a junkie named Luke (Dylan Sprouse), who happened to be in the store when they were robbing it; for no very comprehensible reason, they kidnap Luke and drag him with them to a desert commune where more spaced-out young folk are loafing around and avoiding the apocalypse. Although several characters are meant to be either smackheads or sick, they all look picturesquely skeevy, like a heroin-chic fashion spread back in the 90s.
This all might have been entertaining in an on-trend retro way if the acting weren’t so dismally poor, the dialogue so banal, and the whole thing so listlessly dull as it sputters towards an outrageously dumb Usual Suspects-style twist ending. Also, the film-makers are lucky poor old William Blake’s work is out of copyright, otherwise his heirs (were any to be found) would have a good reason to sue.
