Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour's 2016 Bad Batch continues a long history in film of both imagining dystopian futures and representing various forms of "the other" -- the barbarous other of civilization, the myriad of others who don't fit in to social norms, those who, in the words of Keano Reeve's character "The Dream": "weren't good enough, smart enough, young enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, sane enough. Freaks. Parasites."

The post-apocolyptic world Amirpour creates, a kind of mash-up of Mad Max and Burning Man, includes merciless cannibals, blazing deserts, cults, drugs, raves and, amazingly, love. 

Maybe what's outside the COMFORT of the cave is actually pretty scary.

Maybe there are cannibals there.

And yet, Arlen is compelled to return to it, in the end.

Because it's real and, as the sign says, COMFORT is not.