The Great Curdling

A kind of warped Sci- fi Folk-tale, the film follows two women through a bizarre, broken landscape of collapsing signs and imploding meanings, on a pilgrimage to the Winter Gardens, to cure their green baby. In this fantastic, primitive-future world, the difference between technology and magic has become incomprehensible. Our characters become entangled in a cargo-cult of Margaret Thatcher, and buy a Maggie doll which spouts quotations to guide them when they pull its string.

It's not the bats' fault. Holed up in lockdown, I made a bat-head mask, I made a skeleton. I made a miniature wood by collecting twigs and moss from the local cemetery, scraping it off the gravestones. "Not Yet Out of the Wood" is a phrase that we are going to keep on hearing during our long entanglement with COVID-19. Bats have been around for 50 million years and now their habitats are being destroyed at a terrifying rate. I wanted to give them right of reply.

The director couldn’t have anticipated the coronavirus epidemic, but here is a near-future world in which a middle-class protagonist lives indoors, congratulating himself on the economic virtues of having ingested ‘animal condensed’ – an unexplained substance that seems to merge human and animal – and its benefits to his comfortably alienated life. “It optimises, it abstracts… it made us safe, here at home, with our accelerated portfolios”, he explains. Upstairs, his daughter virtually reconfigures Peppa Pig. Outside, meanwhile, hiding in the forest, is an unnamed, camouflaged fugitive, who explains her escape from a society that seems to have happily abolished the distinction between organic and technological life. An artist who has become a guerrilla fighter, the woman is busy preparing totem-like countermeasures to disrupt those who have become ‘animal expanded’.