Dir: Yasuaki Nakajima. Starring: Yasuaki Nakajima, Jacqueline Bowman, Zorikh Lequidre, Oscar Lowe, Moises Morales.
The end of the world has a potent attraction for film-makers, as the recent success of The Day After Tomorrow illustrates only too well. However, Roland Emmerich's effects-driven movie easily cost over a hundred million dollars, a budget available to only a very few directors (and practically no good ones). In any case, large-scale recreations of natural or man made disasters may pose a technical challenge but artistically are like shooting fish in a barrel.
Independent cinema seldom has money to burn on big action set-pieces, and even if it did would probably shun such an uncomplicated literalist approach to themes that have such deep and varied possibilities. Yasuaki Nakajima has created After The Apocalypse on a shoestring, but that hardly matters. This movie follows the story of a group of disparate survivors that, having got through some unspecified calamity, struggle to keep going in an environment of decay and hopelessness.
There are five survivors in total throughout the film, and all of these are unnamed. Indeed, the apocalypse of the title appears to have robbed them of their voices, so nothing emerges from their throats except a painful-sounding shriek. This makes it inordinately difficult for the group to communicate with each other, an effect that Nakajima enhances by the absence of written as well as spoken language. The survivors have soft stone to etch with, but can only muster pictures and never a single word. By effectively denying the characters a language the director has isolated them even from their fellows, a brilliant thematic device, not to mention a boon to the low budget film-maker worried about poor sound recording or dodgy amateur performances.
Unfortunately, the lack of dialogue mixed with eventually repetitive visuals can make the movie a struggle to sit through, even at a modest 72 minute running time. The thrust of the narrative, such as it is, revolves around a fight for the affections of the only female left alive. Various men contend for her attention, and a considerable amount of violence ensues. Still, he seems only mildly fond of any of them, although exhibiting a definite longing for children, and in that some hope for the future of humanity can be drawn.
Yet After the Apocalypse is fundamentally rather grim, and most effective when at it's earthiest. A scene where a character masturbates over a pornographic magazine in the open is both amusing and telling. Later, there is an electric moment when, after burying a fallen comrade, you can see the moment of realization when it hits them that with food so hard to come by that is perhaps not best use of a corpse. A tighter narrative with more variety of setting would have been welcome, but even so it remains a creditable achievement and a promise of more to come from Nakajima.
Currently showing on the festival circuit, After the Apocalypse is well worth looking out for.
Chris Denton .
Official Website: www.aftertheapocalypse.com
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