CIFF Notes: Mad God (Friday Oct 22 - 10:30pm)

The "After Dark" portion of the Chicago International Film Festival is dedicated to a brand of shock cinema the festival guarantees will "keep you up late into the night," which was aided by the relentlessly jarring sound design of Phil Tippet's magnum opus Mad God and the free can of iced coffee sponsoring the festival that was handed out at the door. The programmer of this series assured us that we were in for something unlike anything we will ever see in Phil Tippet's 30-years-in-the-making Mad God, and while I generally swoon to the allure of unique cinematic experiences, I wasn't wholly won over by this, admittedly, one-of-a-kind passion project. For a film so full of unique visual flourishes, it's interesting to me that Tippet is someone that any genre or sci-fi film lover is highly familiar with, even if they don't know his name. Tippet is the FX artist responsible for the iconic holographic chess game in the original Star Wars film, as well as creature designs and visual effects for a slew of major films, from Jurassic Park to the Twilight saga. If someone is going into Mad God as a fan of those Tippet projects, they will be getting something much bleaker than any of those films, and something way less mainstream. In fact, that may have something to do with why this film gets my award for "best overheard post-screening audience comments," which ranged from the unimpressed to the utterly gob-smacked. My reaction falls somewhere in between.

Mad God excels incredibly well in a wordless visual storytelling mode for, roughly, the first half of the film. In fact, I was so taken with the hero's journey of a "diving bell" trooper lowered into an apocalyptic landscape, who occasionally unfolds a progressively disintegrating map toward an uncertain goal, that I began to trust the film's adeptness with visual storytelling. The vision is dark and disturbing, to be sure, and Tippet assures you that there will be little frivolity early on in this journey with the brief and comparatively colorful appearance of two tiny garden gnomes amidst the strafed landscape, then immediately crushed under the bootheel of our protagonist. Yet, the final half of Mad God aggressively rips away any semblance of engaging storytelling that the first half seems to promise, opting for a seemingly endless sequence involving the excruciating repetition of cries from a bloody grub worm that is eventually transformed into silver dust and sent into the cosmos by some giant, Tim Burton-esque, black-beaked specter. This act seemingly causes the film to go into a heavily Kubrick-inspired hallucinatory state, while also sparking an endless repetition of civilizations being disintegrated and re-formed, clocks winding forward and back, images dark and gooey and horrified coming at the screen at a rate that defies the viewer's ability to process. It should be said that, generally, I love that kind of thing. I'm not one who's critical response clings to narrative cohesion exactly, and am prone to experimental detours, but the finale of Mad God seemed unhinged in a way that felt simultaneously rushed (which seemed odd for a film 30 years in the making) and not really doing anything interesting within experimental traditions, or even just being engagingly trippy. Of course, it's likely that Tippet's intent is that it all go off the rails, and he has reported that much of it was completed by his film students on Saturdays who were looking to get some experience, which I can see creating a somewhat disjointed end product. It isn't called Narratively Concise God, after all, and while it is a somewhat unforgettable experience that will likely find a cult fan base, I think it might have been more successful as a few shorter films.