Undergods

In a decaying vision of Europe where time folds in on itself, Undergods unfolds as a darkly humorous triptych of interconnected tales. An original synth score, steeped in the cold pulse of 1980s electronica, threads through the film's shifting eras, lending each vignette a hypnotic, unsettling rhythm. The world the film inhabits is one where the familiar — sterile shopping aisles, quiet apartment blocks, family dinners — feels subtly wrong, as if reality has slipped a few degrees off its axis.

The journey is framed by two drifters navigating a post-apocalyptic outskirts, scavenging amid ruins as they trade strange, unsettling dreams. Their conversations give way to nested narratives that leap between centuries and settings, each story seeding the one that follows. We meet a middle-aged couple, Ron and Ruth, as the only inhabitants of a seemingly empty new apartment building, whose quiet domestic life is unsettled by the unexpected arrival of a stranger named Harry. Elsewhere, a divorced merchant named Hans becomes entangled with an eccentric foreigner over a curious invention, a setup that draws in his daughter Maria and her new suitor. A final thread introduces Dominic, a senior engineer whose polished modern life — complete with a boss named Tim and a birthday party on the horizon — begins to fray when the household receives a strange, silent visitor.

Across these interlocking portraits, the film explores how fragile the architecture of family, home, and routine truly is. Marriages simmer with unspoken resentments, fathers and stepfathers circle one another warily, and the spaces we think we understand reveal hidden vacancies. Blending the fantastical with the achingly mundane, Undergods finds its dark comedy in the collision of failed societies and contemporary anxieties — where the arrival of an outsider, whether wandering or invited, can quietly unmoor everything.