‘The Bad Batch’ poetic, strangely plausible tale

As she demonstrated with her debut feature, the black-and-white, Farsi-language feminist vampire fable “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour is very good at weirdo world-building.

Set in a dystopian near-future, her follow-up to that 2014 film is called “The Bad Batch,” and the universe that this new movie conjures — a wasteland where examples of America’s human garbage struggle to survive in an unforgiving desert dotted with trash heaps and encampments of cannibals — feels dizzyingly extreme and disturbingly plausible.

“This isn’t real,” reads a sign in one of the last outposts of human decency, a sanctuary city called, appropriately enough, Comfort, and run by a benevolent despot called The Dream (Keanu Reeves). At the same time, it feels sickeningly persuasive, given some of the violent, divisive rhetoric currently polluting civic discourse.

It is into the community of Comfort that Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) has wandered, after being cast from civilized society. Although the no man’s land into which she has been thrown is populated by the undocumented, the sick, the insane, the poor, the weak and the criminal, the film’s heroine seems pretty well adjusted. The same can’t said for the savages who waylay her on her way to Comfort. Known as the “bridge people,” the group of man-eaters quickly capture Arlen and harvest her arm and legs for food.

After Arlen escapes to Comfort with the daughter of a woman she has killed in self-defense — a little girl named Honey (Jayda Fink) — the story fast-forwards five months to a time when Arlen is able to hobble around on a prosthetic leg while listening to The Dream expound on his philosophy of governance: “I make s— go away,” he tells Arlen.

The problem with “The Bad Batch” is that, despite such lovely, otherworldly touches, there’s isn’t much narrative conflict, once Arlen escapes from the bridge people’s abattoir to Comfort. The plot, such as it is, is largely fueled by Honey’s father (Jason Momoa), a cannibalistic loner known as Miami Man who wants his daughter back. How and why Arlen agrees to help him achieve that goal is the main question of the film.

Comfort may be Edenic — at least compared with the open desert — but it isn’t necessarily a place where you would want to raise a kid. After all, it isn’t real, as the sign says. “The Bad Batch” suggests that it might be better to fend for yourself among people who make no secret about wanting to eat you.