Directed by Ben Hopkin
89 minutes
In English with English subtitles

This obscure flick was recommended to me by someone who visited my screenings. It wasn't easy to locate it, but once I saw it, I was blown away. This is an eccentric, surreal, unpredictable road movie that takes place in London, and depicts a world collapsing from some incomprehensible chain of events. It all seems to begin when a taxi picks up a strange customer on the M25 motorway. Soon we witness our entire existence unravel and fall apart at the seams in a mind-blowing sequence of events. This wild trip combines the out-of-control excesses of Ken Russell, and fuses them with the outer limits of David Lynch's sudden reality-change flips. It is an apocalyptic movie, full of outrageous black humor, and at the same time makes some damn sharp insights into the modern world we find ourselves in today.

As we watch the entire populace of London losing its grip on reality and becoming babbling idiots, it's hard not to connect this scenario with what is happening all around us today. Reality is becoming thousands of fragmented loose ends, and many people can't think straight anymore. The population of London in this movie doesn't have a clue as to what is happening to them, or why. That's where, at least for me, this film clicks with everything that is happening today. In this film everyone is reduced to short-term memory with no idea of the past. Personally when I look around I sometimes wonder if our culture is beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's. A kind of delirious dementia. There is no longer a steady train of thought, no flow, no line. Instead, through over-information and new technologies our thoughts are constantly distracted and disrupted... zigzagging and riddled with glitches. People are even being interrupted all the time by their mobile phones. How can anyone poetically meditate on what's going on around them in such circumstances? The absurdity presented in this movie is scarily familiar. As one character complains, "There is too much stuff in the world, and people keep making more stuff." Although this is a movie about the fictional end of the world, for me, it is actually more about modern life.

This flick draws on a full bag of cinematic influences, from ghostly black-and-white German expressionism to the surrealism of Luis Buñuel. There is also some Monty Python, Derek Jarman and experimental cinema. But in the end it's certainly in its own out-of-whack orbit. Although it's a low-budget movie, what it lacks in money it overcompensates with imagination.