Greg Araki's Nowhere (1997) DVD Review

Gregg Araki is one of the most increasing disappointing filmmakers in history. He made the fantastic Mysterious Skin, which boosted great performances, score and a real maturity to an extremely difficult subject matter of child abuse. Nowhere is one of his earlier films and one of his very worse despite a endlessly intriguing concept of this college students going to a party movie with apocalyptic themes, alien abduction, bisexuality and acid drenched visuals. It is the final part of his self proclaimed “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy”. The other films in the trilogy areTotally Fucked Up and The Doom Generation.

The film stars the very underrated James Duval (he played Frank the Bunny) and does what he can with the very flimsy script. He does just play the same depressed bisexual teenager in all of Araki’s films he is in (which is the majority the 90s ones). The film also features a wealth of then young upcoming actors (who would later become famous) such as Ryan Phillippe, Mena Suvari, Denise Richards and Heather Graham. It also features cameos from such actors such as Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, John Ritter, Traci Lords and Christina Applegate.

Araki is probably one of the worst cinematic storytellers around exception of Mysterious Skin his last acts are always a bad cop out if it’s the end of the world, a person becoming a bug, a main character being killed by neo-nazis and so on. The film has a nice acid influenced visual style especially in it’s wonderful production design. It also boosts a nice running time of just under 80 minutes. It has many things going for including a wonderful soundtrack with The Jesus & Mary Chain, Slowdive, Suede, Lush, Cocteau Twins, Sonic Youth and so on. The main problem is clearly its story it really needed a couple more drafts before they started shooting but that can be said for the majority of Araki’s films.