On Friday nights, IndieWire After Darkish honors fringe cinema within the streaming age with midnight motion pictures from any second in movie historical past.
First, the BAIT: a bizarre style decide, and why we’re exploring its particular area of interest proper now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled reply to the all-important query, “Is that this outdated cult movie truly value recommending?”
The Bait: 1971’s (Non-Perishable) U.S. Political Apocalypse
Films about viral pandemics and world-ending well being disasters surged in reputation through the COVID-19 lockdown. Not as a result of streaming audiences have been craving escape from their darkish actuality, however as a result of viewers have been nonetheless quietly searching for recognition from the remoted security of their houses. These movies didn’t supply “consolation” a lot as affirmation, and watching “28 Days Later” or “Contagion” turned a approach to externalize your dread and exhaustion at a time when actual life felt unfathomably apocalyptic.
That’s the place 1971’s “Punishment Park” lands with terrifying precision in 2026. As tempers flare throughout the USA, and the worry of authoritarianism intensifies underneath a second Trump administration, that very same baptism-by-fire intuition has returned to private movie programming. For a lot of, this isn’t a second for soothing cinema. It’s a time for inventive work that stares immediately into the panic we face.
Directed by British filmmaker Peter Watkins, this 1971 pseudo-documentary imagines an America underneath a declared state of nationwide emergency — one the place Nixon’s martial regulation has changed civil liberties and constitutionally protected dissent is handled as a prison risk. (Sound acquainted?) Watkins levels the movie as a vérité documentary, shot on uncooked 16mm with an abrasive immediacy that collapses the gap between historic fiction and pressing journalism.
The end result doesn’t really feel speculative a lot as barely hypothetical, at the same time as its central conceit veers into “Starvation Video games” territory. “Punishment Park” tracks two teams of political prisoners, Group 637 and Group 638, each accused of sedition. One group endures a sham tribunal whereas the opposite is obtainable a grotesque various to federal incarceration: three days operating by way of the California desert with out meals or water, hunted by armed authorities, with freedom ready at an American flag planted 53 miles away. Because the prisoners cut up between pacifistic resistance and violent revolt, the film turns into a menacing examine of oppressive coercion underneath capitalism.
Half a century on, Watkins’ sensible dialogue nonetheless circulates on-line, sometimes going viral to at the present time. Wander into the “r/socialism” subreddit, and also you’ll discover “Punishment Park” monologues dissected in fashionable threads that hash out their eerie, modern relevance. That timelessness is probably the most unsettling a part of the movie, which was broadly censored upon launch for daring to painting the U.S. authorities as a fascist aggressor. That’s reminder sufficient that censorship itself is cyclical.
Proceed with warning, in fact. “Punishment Park” presents no aid and no religion in institutional redemption. Watching it earlier than February looks like being trapped in a dystopian Groundhog Day — however in a second as horrifying as this, feeling seen stands out as the solely consolation we’ve left. -OF
“Punishment Park” is now streaming on Tubi.
The Chew: The Extra Issues Change…
At a time as tumultuous as this, my first intuition is to retreat inward by way of cinema — to observe one thing frothy and ridiculous, as far faraway from the present circumstances as I can discover. (My final film logged on Letterboxd is “However I’m a Cheerleader,” for instance.) So, I have to confess that “Punishment Park” felt like a tall order for me to deal with right now, and watching it definitely didn’t supply me any consolation. However what it did present was an enchanting glimpse into our latest historical past.
Extremely prescient and good in its depiction of energy and corruption, Watkins’ work right here is greater than forward of its time. Earlier than this, I used to be conscious of his most well-known movie, “The Conflict Sport,” however didn’t totally grasp that the docudrama and mockumentary codecs owe their existence to his serious-minded strategy to this model of storytelling. It’s simple to identify the DNA of numerous later movies on this incisive framework from 1971; “The Blair Witch Venture,” “The Workplace,” and even dying recreation tales like “Battle Royale” and “The Starvation Video games” have roots in what Watkins is doing, even working in its excessive political register.
What’s most spectacular and disorienting about Watkins’ filmmaking is how simply it scans as the actual deal. After all, what you’re seeing is pretend. The circumstances of Punishment Park are so excessive and horrifying that there’s no manner an oppressive U.S. authorities of the Seventies would let a documentary crew movie it, and such an occasion would by no means escape historical past books. However recorded with a small skeleton crew of eight individuals and a single 16mm digital camera, “Punishment Park” is a convincing, rough-and-tumble simulation.
There are occasional moments of magnificence within the scenes on location on the El Mirage Dry Lake, however for probably the most half, Watkins doesn’t gown issues up excessively. The movie is shot just like the soiled, oppressive wasteland it’s meant to be, and a whole lot of credit score goes to the ensemble assembled right here. They nail their roles — be it political protestor or corrupt official — and produce frantic emotion to a story that’s genuine relatively than actorly.
The second “Punishment Park” dips into full horror is available in its ending, when the crew of women and men who preserve their pacifist beliefs underneath the specter of violence lastly attain the American flag that was promised to them as a end line that will assure their freedom, just for police to be ready to assault them proper in entrance of it. “You assume we’d allow them to attain that flag? You assume they deserved that flag?” a police officer snarls on the distressed documentarian. In a rigged system, taking part in good doesn’t repay in any respect, and as “Punishment Park” tells audiences, who actually may use a reminder proper nowtypically the one resolution is to flee completely. —WC
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