Border Zones
On the margins of the mainstream with In the Lost Lands and One Of Them Days.
This piece contains spoilers for One Of Them Days.
“I hear you’re a hunter. That you travel the Lost Lands. I have need of such a man.” There’s something wonderfully reassuring about a speech like this, especially in the mouth of Milla Jovovich as a cryptically tattooed but beauteous witch—“beauteous” is definitely the right adjective—in a far-off future so grim it’s rendered solely in shades of charcoal or sepia, aside from stray details like the scarlet robe of a cruel priestess named Ash (Arly Jover), among the powermongers vying for control of the walled City Under the Mountain.
In The Lost Lands is based on a 1982 short story by the Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, which it follows in outline till the wilfully disjointed ending. But in spirit it’s more of the same from the British writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson, best-known for his long-running Resident Evil series of video game adaptations, starring Jovovich, his wife and muse, as a genetically modified warrior named Alice, who could be an ancestress of Grey Alys, the Jovovich character here.
As a genre filmmaker, Anderson is so straightforward he looks sophisticated, or the other way around: he’s not into campy winks, nor socially relevant themes. His main way of departing from convention is simply to mix up as many genres as he can: while the opening narration of In The Lost Lands denies that the film is a fairy tale, he has no qualms about putting a traditional witch at the centre of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi narrative that borrows especially heavily and openly from Mad Max: Fury Road.