QUICK’N DRTY: LIVE FROM MOTELX
This film opens with a close-up of a baby boy wrapped cosily in a red blanket, surrounded by adults who are all inhaling and exhaling smoke from their cigarettes. It is an image of helpless innocence already being corrupted by toxically selfish experience, and suggests a world, stylised but recognisably our own, into which perhaps a child might better not be born. The footage, it will turn out, is a highly effective anti-smoking advertisement, spearheaded by the mystically calm online activist Bane (Milos Lolic), who campaigns, bit by bit, to make the world a better place.
Bane has his work cut out for him. For when the ad is revealed to be playing on the smartphone of a young boy in a park, a second boy snatches the phone away, and as they fight over it, both will turn on a third boy who tries to intervene peacefully. This park may look Edenic, but already the viciousness and chaos, not to mention the technology, of humanity have disrupted its natural peace – and Yelena (Jelena Djokic), a happily single pregnant woman sitting alone on a bench nearby, is about to have her own idyll ruined by a phone call.
The mysterious male voice (Sergej Trifunovic) on the other end of the line will give Yelena a series of murderous missions, and make it very clear that any failure to comply will result in the destruction of the foetus inside her. For this ‘Creator of Content’ wants to punish evildoers, and to rescue his son from certain corporate interests that have led him astray, all so as to rebalance our off-kilter world – and not only does he claim to be a divine, bad-boy Buddha, but he can back up these claims with displays of immense, lethal power. Now Yelena finds herself riding a shotgun for an invisible partner who creates violence and death wherever they both go – but as Yelena bumbles through her instructions, and discovers unexpected inner strength in her love for her unborn baby, a broader cosmic plot appears to be playing out on a spiritual plane.
With its protagonist reluctantly executing assassinations under remote threat of harm, this recalls Evan Marlowe’s Abruptio (2023) and Jean-Luc Herbulot’s Zero (2024). With its expectant mother driven to a killing spree by a disembodied voice, this evokes Alain Robak’s Baby Blood (1990) and Alice Lowe’s Prevenge (2016). And with its pantheon of divinities battling to rehearse ancient, indeed timeless stories through the new media of online influencers, streaming conglomerates and mobile phones, it recalls television’s American Gods (2017-2021).
Yet perhaps the key intertext for writer/director Aleksandar Radivojević’s Karmadonna is the controversial A Serbian Film (2010), which Radivojević co-wrote with its director Srjan Spasojevic. For both films are dark satires, restaging the structural problems and societal divisions of a nation as surreally bloody, grotesquely larger-than-life drama. The difference is that where Spasojevic’s film saw only despair and death in a pornified Serbia, Radivojevic looks to solutions, heralding, through this theological tale of sex and zen, the eventual, perhaps cyclical salvation of the world through a second, third, fourth or fifth coming. The film’s syncretic mixing of Buddhist and Christian matrices, suggested by the blend word of its very title, is played out to the end, as this story of messianism and mysticism, reincarnation and resurrection, karma, communion (and Kurt Cobain!), plays out through a newly politicised pietà of mother and son. It is a broad, gross, carnivalesque vision of a world certainly fallen but perhaps, after all, not quite so godless.
Karmadonna screened at MOTELX 2025.
