“I…am DJ Apocalypso. (It’s not my real name) I’m the Leader here.”
“I’m Kate. (It is my real name.)”
Martin Gooch is one of those directors who’s got a lot of attention from this site and there’s a reason for that: his incredible first film, After Death (2012). It is a lovely mix of ghost story, family comedy, science fiction film and something rather stranger.
With a little help from a Kickstarter campaign and SciFi London, he followed it up with The Search for Simon (2013), a sweet and absurd comedy with SF overtones, and has since made another horror film The Gatehouse.
Black Flowers is his venture into the post-Apocalyptic survival film and as you might expect from someone who makes films that don’t fit neatly into the accepted categories, it is a rather unusual example of the breed.
It is also (much to my surprise) set in the United States, unlike any of Martin’s film’s so far — even though Kate and her family are British.
That nuclear Apocalypse everyone expected during the Cold War finally happened and the biggest threat the survivors face is each other. Kate is just an ordinary mother, trying to keep her family safe while trying to find something better than hiding in a hole.
After her husband is seriously wounded by a band of marauders, they join forces with another survivor, in search of a bunker which might contain a treasure in food and ammunition. But something happens that puts her daughter in danger and Kate just isn’t going to stand for that!
Ignore the blurbs suggesting that Kate is some sort of female superhero. In fact, what makes her most interesting is that she is just an ordinary mother who meets her strange new world with courage and lots of determination.
Most of this plays out as a straightforward drama, but there are a number of often surreal Monty Python-esque moments, like the fledgling religious cult with the flight of rolling steps and the inexplicable arrival of a knight on horseback. I’ll confess, I got the impression from the trailer that this would be the tone of the entire film and, yes, I would have loved to see that film.
However, those surreal moments and the gentle humor don’t prevent Black Flowers from being an often dark and serious film — and the dark moments don’t drown out the fun of some of the more absurd moments.
While the cast is solid (despite the often eccentric characters they play) Krista DeMille’s performance as Kate anchors the film: she offers us a character who is definitely not superhuman, who makes mistakes, and who can and does get hurt. It is that very ordinariness in the midst of chaos that holds this at times surreal film together.
Perhaps the best moment comes when Kate and her daughter reach what seems the perfect place — except that everyone there is engaged in a non-stop party until they die, like everything else in post-Apocalyptic America. I wonder how many of us in our day and age would have chosen, as she does, to walk away?
And I have to give Martin Gooch a lot of credit because the film reaches what seems to have been its inevitable end all along, only to take a very different and unexpected turn, one which offers a little hope for the future.
Not to mention that we learn something totally unexpected about those sinister black flowers.
That’s always welcome to see in a post-Apocalyptic film.
(My thanks to Krista DeMille for providing a screener)
rivets on the poster 
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