In The Lost Lands

Paul W.S. Anderson’s first film since 2020’s Monster Hunter, In the Lost Lands delivers on the promises accompanying a new PWSA film—an irreproachable understanding of digital image making, a 4-D chess level mastery of space, the “divine player” aesthetic, & slick action—and it does so within a dark fairytale and twisted love story that merges the post-Americana genre fantasies of George RR Martin. The hopeful apocalypticism of Anderson and the utilitarian sensitivities of Martin were always a match for one another. The latter has been famously quoted for describing how his approach to fantasy differs from Tolkien through actual politics and material history. “What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs?” Martin rhetorically asked Rolling Stone, highlighting what makes Westeros different from Middle Earth. In the Lost Lands, as in Westeros, how things came to be and how that affects the lives of the masses matters, a natural fit for Anderson’s obsession with mapping, time keeping, and grisly apocalypses.

The civilized world ended some time ago and one feeble and draconian city remains, the accurately named City Under the Mountain. The rest is the Lost Lands, overrun by all sorts of ghouls and goons. Milla Jovovich, Anderson’s wife and most inseparable creative partner, plays the infamous witch Gray Alys and is actively hunted by “the church,” a cultic group led by a woman known as Ash the Enforcer (Arly Jover) and decked out in medieval Templar fashion. Like a genie that can’t say no, she grants the desires of any who ask of her. The Queen (Amara Okereke) asks for the powers of a shapeshifter and Gray Alys sets off to the Lost Lands with Boyce (Dave Bautista) to find a shapeshifter and siphon its power. Before she leaves she makes a few contradictory promises that the wonderful eyes of Milla Jovovich sell with impossible self-assurance. She will deliver on these promises, and only a fool would doubt Gray Alys, but she will do so in an unexpected way. She knows something that we don’t; this much is certain. She employs herself like an immortal being inquisited in a court of mortals.

The beatific vision of hell in Event Horizon exempted, the chillingly dark world might be the darkest in Anderson’s filmography. Described by Anderson as “the graphic novel that Hieronymus Bosch never wrote,” this is the sort of world one wishes they could give Ted Cruz a one-way ticket to. The Anthropocene rusts away as a backdrop to cinematographer Glen MacPherson’s strong silhouettes and enviable painterly images. Tall windmills and concrete buildings are among the last signs of our world under the red-brown nuclearized sky. There are werewolves, undead skeletons, and magic witches—all of whom are less scary than the church and the Overlord (Jacek Dzisiewicz)’s empire that powers it.

In the Lost Lands strikes new territory for Anderson on several fronts—his first film with Jovovich as a proper producer, his first proper foray into the supernatural, a reaffirmation of a new fondness for open over closed spaces—but it’s his new uses for religion that interest most. The “church” certainly looks Christian-coded. They wear crosses, and crosses scatter the landscape, though there is never any positive statement affirming a rooting in Christian thought or ecclesiastical succession. It’s more or less an empty symbol of empire and the murderous exploitation of power. The church is after the witch in the first place because she is a “heretic,” aligning her with what might be called pagan powers. Her exotic face tattoos lean into this possibility.

Religion is not new to his films; it’s been there from the get-go, as I demonstrate in my two-part essay about the visual theology of his films. But here, as in Resident Evil: The Chapter though in a completely different way, the religious themes are integral to the political messaging. The church upholds the current order; magic subverts it. Gray is a witch with the power to manipulate minds and create hallucinations, perhaps the most individualistic expression of spirituality. She channels the supernatural herself without the mediation or permission of a third-party institution (e.g., a church). It is the institutional religion, the crusader-inquisitional church, that Anderson shows no fondness for (and something consistent with Martin’s work too). The ending, in a classical-PWSA move, overthrows the powerful as the slave-workers of the City, taking inspiration from Gray, rebel against their overlords (this time, the revolution looks more impulsive or spontaneous and anarchic, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg.) The witchcraft of Gray puts an emphasis on personal agency in the same way that the ending celebrates revolution.

More and more critics are finally appreciating Anderson as a filmmaker. Still, the minority who do appreciate him tend to box him into some sort of formalist-robot whose artistry is limited to his ability to make interesting and beautiful images. It’s true that he could probably shoot better images on used toilet paper than most filmmakers could ever dream of, but to reduce him to a simple image-maker is an insult to his images!

Take one of the final sequences of In the Lost Lands as an example. Returning to the city as a symbol of resistance following Gray Alys’s movie-long confrontation with the church and her ill-intended and dooming delivery on the Queen’s request, the enslaved workers dangerously mining away on the mountain’s side surface greet her with an empowered chant: “The witch who will not hang! The witch who will not hang!” Their chanting moves from celebrating her as a symbol of resistance to actual resistance, cheering for the downfall of the Overlord and Queen as they kick and toss the armed guards (slave masters) into the pit below them. They fall from the top of the mountain to the bottom, a hierarchy whose subversion is indelible from the effect of the images.

The lenses create a circular shallow effect that looks incredibly similar to the innovative lenses Zack Snyder developed for Rebel Moon. The colors are a very precise goldish-brown and black (similar to the existing prints of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen). The biggest light source—easily controlled in the digital production that synchronizes digital and real cameras in Unreal Engine, allowing live bluescreen backgrounds (and synchronized movement between the camera and background, unlike in the Volume)—hits one of the workers from the front, silhouetting him from the back as he raises his hammer in defiance. The sparkle of the light turns the tool into a weapon, the anonymous slave into a hero. A few shots later, MacPherson lets the camera sparkle again only this time the sparkling object is the dress of the Queen. The difference in what sparkles for the bourgeoise ruling class and their subaltern underlings visually connects the dots of their material dissonance. One is a symbol of hard work and poverty; the other a symbol of wealth and leisure. To isolate these powerful images from what they communicate diminishes their greatness.