Review of Apocalypsis (2018) by Albino — 10 Apr 2020

In a parallel world heading toward a black hole, an ethereal albino beauty reads Revelations. As things progress, visions of angelic beings, strange shadow organizations, and pondering on man’s impact on the Earth leading to end times.

The main thing Apocalypsis has going for it is style for miles. This is exactly the type of thing that comes to mind when I hear the term ‘arthouse genre film’…there are beautiful people doing oft times inexplicable things in aesthetically pleasing locations, fantastic stop-motion dreamscapes (reminiscent of the early work of Japanese auteur Shinya Tsukamoto)…in other words, it’s gorgeous…but as pretty as it all is there are some problems….

Let’s start with the narrative…as mentioned above, and as the title suggests, the film involves the Biblical Book of Revelations…there’s also angels, parallel dimensions, strange conspiracies…all manner of bizarre and fascinating things, but all of it flies at you like a rocket, with some new element appearing every other minute that makes the entire thing seem disjointed…like the film maker’s had a bunch of cool ideas, and not an overly strong way to bringing it all together (I did find out after the fact that this is part of some over arching narrative spread over a handful of films, but seeing how this was put together I expect solid explanations are never given). I honestly don’t want my hand held when watching a feature, but I do at least want the overall pieces to seem to fit together, which often isn’t the case here.

For what it is, namely a motion picture that is an intricately designed, aesthetically pleasing work of art with it’s own agenda that it isn’t always willing to announce to those viewing it, Apocalypsis succeeds, and I would recommend it to fans of features like Tetsuo The Iron Man (created by the aforementioned Tsukamoto), Takahisa Zeze’s Moon Child, or even Michael Almereyda’s Nadja…all film’s that create their own universes of oblique, even quasi-Religious dream realities, but for those that like their apocalyptic sci-fi a bit more on the nose you may want to look elsewhere.