Who is popular today?

Chino Moya’s stylish debut, an anthology of unsettling dystopian tales, lacks subtlety but brims with exceptional performances
The Spanish film-maker Chino Moya, who directed the colourfully Orwellian music video for St Vincent’s Digital Witness, makes his feature debut with this eye-catching, Twilight Zone-style anthology of future-tense tales. Laced with a graveside humour reminiscent of the old EC comics (Moya’s multidisciplinary credits include the graphic novel Flat Filters), it’s a collection of grimly satirical snapshots, fitting together like the misshapen pieces of a Chinese puzzle ball to create a dyspeptic, dystopian portrait of our past, present and future.
In a bleak European underworld, a pair of corpse collectors, K (Johann Myers) and Z (Géza Röhrig), prowl the streets, picking up the dead. Around them are the remnants of a once-grand civilisation, the aftermath of some apocalyptic collapse. As they work, they spin nightmarish tales of other worlds, leading us into a fluid maze of cautionary tales. Continue reading...