Look past the uneven narrative and you’ll find a new cinematic voice with something to prove, and the formal prowess to back it up.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Paste Magazine by Andrew Crump
As an arrival, Undergods impresses, but what’s under the surface needs finessing.
There might have been time for some plot-holes to be fixed, characters to be developed deeper, or some such, but Undergods manages to mesmerize and captivate every minute of the way with a bewitching visual palette and an appropriately fitting electronic score
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Moya has a great eye for locales and his production and art designers go above and beyond utilizing what Eastern Europe has to offer.
The Observer (UK) by Mark Kermode
It’s a collection of grimly satirical snapshots, fitting together like the misshapen pieces of a Chinese puzzle ball to create a dyspeptic, dystopian portrait of our past, present and future.
Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.
A riptide of surrealism runs through Chino Moya’s ambitious debut feature, a fantasy suite of tales that don’t so much interlock as butt into one another and blurt out alarming, dreamlike correspondences.
There’s “cryptic” and “vague” and then “incoherent to everyone else” and unfortunately, Moya sets up shop at that end of the spectrum.
This arresting first feature blends sci-fi and fantasy to create a worldview which is at once savagely grotesque and alarmingly familiar.