Hope Hiding in Plain Sight: The Dilemmas of Polycrisis Cinema

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cinema  attempt to hold two incongruous themes together: a depiction of the end in its brutal, often sensationalist, violence and the promise that this ending will be the opportunity for ‘us’ to become the best version of who ‘we’ always already were. Recent films have embraced a gritty realism in order to depict the near future that may emerge as the result of the intersecting crises of climate change, intensifying social divisions and growing political instability. I argue these  explorations of the polycrisis harbour hidden hopes, but this poses a dilemma. This hope is directionless—it is a hope in hope itself. Taking 2073 (2024) as an example of this dilemma, I contrast polycrisis cinema with the cinema of the Cold War. I show that films from this earlier period were more willing to engage what Günther Anders calls a ‘naked apocalypse’.