Blood Machines (2019 Abertoir Festival Special)

Director: Seth Ickerman
Production Company: N/A (I couldn’t find one)
Country: FranceFast, loud, gorgeous and stunning, Blood Machines is essentially a 50 minute cyberpunk synthwave music video with a few bits of blood and guts thrown in to qualify for the review on this page. A tag-team between director Seth Ickerman (a pseudonym for a directing duo) and musician Carpenter Brut, Blood Machines is a cyberpunk space opera following two space hunters who follow a downed ship, only to see a woman emerge from the hull like a ghost. What follows is a chase through the galaxy and fight in a nebula with the most gorgeous sci-fi visuals ever put to screen.This is one of those films which, after you’ve seen it once and know the plot, you can turn the dialogue off. The visuals, which are just an eye-watering feast of neon and sci-fi madness, and the ridiculously perfect music, mean that you can just sit back and have a genre-fan’s wet dream for 50 minutes. It is possibly the most stunning piece of visual art I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.There are some bits of blood near the end, but there’s nonetheless still a pervading feeling of darkness and apocalyptic vision surrounding the thing. The hunter’s ship’s computer, Tracy, has some Giger-esque elements to her design, which feeds in to an overall theme of female rebellion, aligning women to machines in the male gaze, and woman’s ultimate uprising and escape. It’s a little sexualised in its application (which is something cyberpunk has traditionally done; it’s always been a very male-dominated subgenre and has at times been attacked for being misogynistic, sometimes justifiably so), but it is still absolutely gorgeous. The rose symbol that comes into it, along with the inverted cross, helps to weave a web of technological progression mirroring sexual freedom and awakening in a rebellion to established grand mythologies (patriarchy, religion, etc). Again, it’s sometimes caggy-handed, but it’s still so artfully done that you can almost give them a pass for it. Almost.It’s a dark futuristic vision of breathtaking imagery. It’s a cyberpunk hallucination; the thing you always wanted but didn’t think was out there aside from in concept art. Not everyone is going to like it, I’ll freely admit, but if you just want your eyes and ears to get lost for an hour in a bombardment of light and sound, then you need to track this down.Rating: 9/10
Review by Kieran Judge
Twitter: @KJudgeMental