The poster art for Yasuaki Nakajima’s After the Apocalypse happily invites comparisons to David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Whoa, there! That’s dangerous ground to be treading … you go putting a name like Lynch on your PR material and people will indeed go ahead and compare, and woe to you if you fail to live up to those lofty standards. Well, here are a couple more names for you. Not only does Nakajima’s stark photography evoke Lynch but there is also a healthy amount of Shinya Tsukamoto and Chris Marker (La Jetee) in there as well. Shot for no money with minimal cast and crew After the Apocalypse is nonetheless a remarkable first feature driven by a striking visual aesthetic.
Much as you’d surmise from the title After the Apocalypse is set after some future, utterly devastating conflict. The world has been shattered, the vast majority of the population has died and cities, buildings and infrastructure left in twisted ruins. The film tells the story of five survivors – one of whom is played by Nakajima himself - trying to survive in the hostile and frightening world. Making matters worse, the survivors have all been rendered mute – I surmise by some sort of chemical attack, though this is never stated outright – thereby making any attempts at cooperation next to impossible and forcing the survivors back into primal fight or flight behavior. It becomes a study in gut-level instinct. How far do you go to help a person you do not know? If they threaten your meager food supply? If they threaten your mate? How do people cope with trauma on this sort of scale?
Nakajima’s decision to make the film entirely non-verbal is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it moves him into very simple, universal territory. He is, after all, making a film about primal things which, by their very nature, don’t translate well into language. He is blessed with a solid cast – his own acting work is every bit as solid and subtle as anything he does behind the camera – who are perfectly capable of expressing themselves through posture and movement and once you accept the lack of dialogue as a given you really don’t miss it. On the other hand it moves him into very simple, universal territory. There are relationships in the film – particularly the cross-gender relationships – that could have stood some greater investigation than was entirely possible without the use of dialogue.
The largest plus to the lack of dialogue, of course, is that it shifts the viewers attention strongly towards the technical aspects of the film and they absolutely do not disappoint. Nakajima has found simply stunning locations for the film and he captures them flawlessly in high contrast black and white. Nakajima has set himself a difficult task in that he has to convince the viewer that they are seeing a truly post-apocalyptic world on screen and that he has to do this using entirely natural settings and he pulls it off effortlessly thanks to an impeccable eye for composition. This is a film where the physical world is every bit as much a character as the human actors are and that is entirely a testament to Nakajima’s skill with the camera. Also impressive is the film’s sound design built up of ambient noise, scraps of remembered sounds and the actual sound of the world around them as well as a truly exceptional score.
After the Apocalypse definitely leans to the experimental side of things. It doesn’t veer as far to that side of things as you might surmise but it does go far enough that way that a mainstream film audience will likely find themselves quite frustrated by it. Those who appreciate minimalism and composition, however, will find an awful lot to like. I am fairly shocked that Nakajima has pulled off something this poised for his debut feature and can only expect good things from him in the future.