Chino Moya’s Intriguing Debut Undergods Feels Underbaked
Chino Moya has style, and style is his saving grace. Without it, Undergods, his mise en abyme-obsessed feature debut, wouldn’t be worth watching outside of a few glorious moments of Kate Dickie coming unhinged. Undergods has ideas about the perils posed by capitalism to every sad bastard living in capitalist societies who doesn’t already have first pick on the food chain: Theirs is a neverending and fruitless scrabble to the top, made tragic by a refusal to accept the futility of the hustle. But every and any movie about capitalism expresses the same ideas, and Moya doesn’t add much to the critique outside of slick aesthetics and bravura craftsmanship.
Style can be substance, of course, and in Undergods that’s especially true. Taking after an anthology film conceit while building a structure that’s all Moya’s, the story hands off the narrative torch from character to character as the large, scattered cast pass through each others’ plot lines to mundane effect: They’re ships in the night skimming over choppy waters they’re doomed to sink beneath. Moya so casually connects Undergods’ various chapters that understanding his characters, much less learning their names or what specifically motivates them beyond the traditional motivations capitalism inspires in people, becomes nearly impossible. We never quite learn who they are. We never quite learn their drives. We never quite learn why we should care about their plights other than their extreme mirroring of our own.
We do get to know Moya’s semi-narrators, K (Johann Myers) and Z (Géza Röhrig)—two men living in the nameless futuristic dystopian landscape Undergods is set against—whose days consist of swigging gasoline and trading yarns in their truck as they drive around picking up corpses and wanderers. The former: Meat. The latter: Bodies to sell into slavery. There’s the movie’s first hammer-subtle capitalist commentary, to be followed by many others, but K and Z’s conversations and harvesting exploits seamlessly weave one tale into the next with such dexterity that it’s hard to find a moment to roll your eyes at the obviousness of the film’s judgments.