Now Apocalypse
2019
Original language: English
- comedy
- sci-fi & fantasy
The story
This surreal, coming-of-age comedy series follows Ulysses and his friends Carly, Ford, and Severine, who are on various quests pursuing love, sex and fame. Between sexual and romantic dating-app adventures, Ulysses grows increasingly troubled as foreboding premonitory dreams make him wonder if some kind of dark and monstrous conspiracy is going on, or if he is just smoking too much weed.
What it’s like
Saturated, candy-colored Los Angeles glows under neon signs, pastel sunsets and bedroom lamps, with Gregg Araki's signature pop-art framing: bold primary-color sets, deliberately artificial production design and frequent close-ups on faces lit like album covers. The soundtrack runs on synth-pop and new-wave pulses that tip into eerie, ambient drone whenever the dreams arrive. Pacing is loose and restless, with quick cuts between dating-app hookups, bitchy group hangouts and sudden hallucinatory interludes that feel like a fever dream. Its vibe is hyper-stylized, deadpan and anxious, somewhere between a teen melodrama and a paranoid thriller, a good fit for a late-night binge when you want something messy and playful with an unsettling undercurrent. The emotional register swings from glib to raw as a restless young man grows uneasy and begins to question his own grip on reality. Sex is frequent and explicit, including graphic nudity and casual, often comic, sexual talk; violence is sudden and bloody but sparse, and dread builds more than gore. Made for viewers who like queer, irreverent, genre-bending work that is as much mood as narrative.
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