Max Just Quietly Added The Most Terrifying Experimental Sci-Fi Movie Of The Decade

Asif Kapadia’s 2073 received little attention when it came out near the end of 2024. It’s not exactly holiday fare: this vision of a bleak dystopian future wracked by environmental cataclysms and brutal authoritarian regimes is even more disturbing due to the chilling fact that much of the footage is not filmed on a soundstage or against a green screen, but is real and taken from contemporary events. But now that’s on Max and as harrowing as ever, 2073 may be the most essential new “sci-fi” film to watch.

Kapadia (Amy) uses actual, current-day documentary, news, and mobile footage as visions of the past experienced by the film’s protagonist, a woman known only as Ghost (Samantha Morton of The Walking Dead and Minority Report — the latter of which is represented by a brief clip). By melding fiction and non-fiction to create a horrifying cinematic vision, Kapadia not only drives home how close we may be to such a devastating reality, but continues a cinematic tradition that stretches from 1965’s The War Game to 2024’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

The 83-minute movie is ostensibly a “warning” narrated by Ghost, who lives in the tunnels underneath an abandoned shopping mall in New San Francisco, which a subtitle calls “Capital of the Americas.” The year is 2073, some 37 years after “The Event,” which Ghost describes as less a single calamity than a rolling series of catastrophes both natural and man-made. The result is an unremittingly bleak, dystopian view of the future, with most of the population scrabbling to survive in polluted, toxic, flooded ruins while the billionaires and oligarchs who now run the world are walled off in massive skyscrapers that provide them with every luxury.

Surveillance drones and brutal military police roam the streets to keep the populace in line, with freedom of speech, assembly, and movement sharply curtailed. Martial law seems perpetually in effect. Ghost ventures cautiously outside every day to hunt for food and other useful things that she and the other denizens of the mall can use, while also visiting a secret place (which might be the remains of a library) where she stores artifacts collected by her grandmother, who “kept the receipts” before being “disappeared” by the regime years earlier.

We’re not exactly sure what we’re supposed to be watching — is it a recording of some kind? Or just Ghost’s memories? — which is one of the film’s flaws (another is that it’s almost too dense with information and speculation to fully absorb). But the images that Kapadia deploys — of huge wildfires, cities covered in sickly yellow-orange smog, refugees streaming off boats or digging in rubble for food, police in military gear viciously beating protesters, corpses strewn along streets — are ripped right from our own devices and headlines.

Much of it comes from mobile phones, taken in places like Ukraine, Africa, and Gaza, while present-day authoritarian rulers like Orban, Putin, Modi, and a certain orange-hued former reality TV host also make appearances throughout. So do investigative journalists, historians, and commentators, who provide a sort of rolling commentary on the conditions that led to “The Event” — conditions that are occurring, developing, or worsening right now.

Also just last year, the French-Persian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig combined a haunting family drama with secretly filmed footage of the real-life protests that tore through Iran in 2022 and 2023. But while that film used those events as background and context in a realistic way, 2073 places its images on a knife-edge between fact and science fiction — and it isn’t even the first movie to portray a dystopian future through the resources of the present.

Peter Watkins’ nightmarish 1966 faux documentary The War Game utilized real government plans and newsreels in combination with footage of a fictional nuclear attack to create one of the most terrifying films ever made about nuclear war, while the 1969 black comedy The Bed-Sitting Room created a post-nuclear wasteland on screen by filming an area of dead trees behind a steel factory in Wales and another area in England covered in trash and broken dishware. The final scenes in 1973’s Soylent Green, which take place in a factory where bodies are converted into food, were shot in a sewage treatment plant. 2009’s The Road was filmed on abandoned stretches of highway in Pennsylvania and in post-Katrina New Orleans.

But perhaps none of these films quite match the scope of 2073. While far from a perfect or even great film, its use of authentic footage to chronicle the next 50 years of human life on Earth and the consequences we face is both distressing and ambitious. The intensity of the footage and the horrors it exposes is almost overwhelming and traumatic at times — and frightening in its implications for the very future it is meant to represent.

2073 is streaming now on Max.