In the current climate in Europe, it almost already feels like we’re living in some sort of dystopian future. Politics has taken a seemingly uncertifiable lurch to the right. Societies have never been more polarised. Governments practice divide and rule. Everything has to be black and white. Global pandemic, Brexit, climate crisis, freak weather conditions, racial intolerance – the list goes on and on. As history seems to be on the verge of repeating itself, Chino Moya’s debut, Undergods, is a sobering watch.
As the collectors slowly move through a grim and grizzly unknown hellscape, picking up bodies as they go, they recount tales of a nightmarish past. Their backdrop is a grey and crumbling urban graveyard, the final moments of a collapsed society. Their stories intertwine to recount the last days of this new Rome. Of people who have given up. Who have accepted the inevitable. Of a failing, broken, morally bankrupt and deeply divided world.
Starring a very talented cast, including Tanya Reynolds, Kate Dickie, Jan Bijvoet and Geza Rohrig, Undergods paints a bleak picture of the broken present and a desolate future. Set to a dreamlike synth score and covered in rich pastel hues, the anthology is utterly bleak but also offers a sliver of hope. Populated by a number of characters who are at turns selfish, exploitative and lost, Undergods is a call to arms to wake up and arrest this decline before it’s too late.
Undergods screens at Fantasia Festival.
