Movie · 2025 · Action, Fantasy, Western · 1h 41m · R · English
Curator score: 0.3/10 (44K ratings)
She seeks the power to free her people.
Overview
A queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where she and her guide, the drifter Boyce, must outwit and outfight both man and demon.
Ratings
Curator score: 0.3/10
IMDb: 4.7/10
Letterboxd: 1.98/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 24%
Metacritic: 41
TMDB: 6.3/10
Director
Paul W. S. Anderson
Production
Constantin Film, Spark Productions
Cast
Milla Jovovich, Dave Bautista, Arly Jover, Amara Okereke, Fraser James, Simon Lööf, Deirdre Mullins, Sebastian Stankiewicz, Tue Lunding, Jacek Dzisiewicz, Eveline Hall, Kamila Klamut, Jan Kowalewski, Tomasz Cymerman, Amir Azimov, Sandor Abdullaev, Nicolas Stone, Ian Hanmore, Caoilinn Springall, Pawel Wysocki
Where to watch
Hulu
Curator Review
Verdict
A rough, often clumsy fantasy-western, but also a very specific piece of genre pulp with striking imagery, committed performances, and enough visual invention to interest fans of Paul W. S. Anderson’s maximalist style. It’s more admirable as a bizarre artifact than as a fully satisfying adventure.
Best for
fans of trashy high-concept genre mashups
viewers who enjoy post-apocalyptic fantasy and western hybrids
audiences receptive to stylized CGI worlds and comic-book logic
completionists for Paul W. S. Anderson or Milla Jovovich
Skip if
you need polished dialogue and coherent worldbuilding
you dislike obvious CGI or digital backdrops
you want a grounded action film
you have little patience for camp or B-movie excess
Overview
In the Lost Lands is the kind of movie that announces its own weirdness immediately and never really apologizes for it. Paul W. S. Anderson leans into a bleak, synthetic fantasy world full of dust, demons, and hard-eyed close-ups, and the result is often more interesting to look at than to listen to. The dialogue is stiff and the storytelling is thin, but the film has a stubborn visual identity that keeps it from disappearing into generic streaming-fantasy mush.
Worth noting
What works best is the mashup itself: western, dark fantasy, post-apocalyptic travelogue, and creature-feature pulp all shoved together with a straight face. Anderson’s action is still readable, and he clearly knows how to frame a face, a weapon, or a landscape so it feels mythic even when the effects are obviously artificial. That tension between cheapness and grandeur is part of the appeal.
Bottom line
This is not a recommendation for everyone, but it may land for viewers who enjoy movies that feel like they were beamed in from an alternate video-store timeline. If you want elegance, skip it. If you want a garish, sincere, slightly deranged genre object, it has enough personality to be worth a look.
Top Letterboxd reviews
davidehrlich (1.5★) · 626 likes
There was a brief moment — right around the release of “Resident Evil: Retribution,” and the discourse about “vulgar auteurism” that peaked along with it — when it seemed as though Paul W.S. Anderson had found a way to weaponize the nü-metal nothingness of his blockbuster slop into a strange kind of somethingness that nobody else could make. If the first three movies in the survival-horror franchise had systematically drained Capcom’s source material of everything that made the “Resident Evil”… more There was a brief moment — right around the release of “Resident Evil: Retribution,” and the discourse about “vulgar auteurism” that peaked along with it — when it seemed as though Paul W.S. Anderson had found a way to weaponize the nü-metal nothingness of his blockbuster slop into a strange kind of somethingness that nobody else could make. If the first three movies in the survival-horror franchise had systematically drained Capcom’s source material of everything that made the “Resident Evil”… more
esther (4★) · 540 likes
PWSA is a poet of hideous CGI landscapes, the painter of soft, hazy light. Monster Hunter, for all its buddy-movie joys, got away from his talent for impressionist computery muck. the world of In the Lost Lands is inspiringly repugnant. this is not a George Miller-style post-apocalypse playground. you certainly wouldn't want to live here! not when every location on the map is called something like Evil Ridge or Scary Pit. it's very true to the spirit of GRRM narrative… more PWSA is a poet of hideous CGI landscapes, the painter of soft, hazy light. Monster Hunter, for all its buddy-movie joys, got away from his talent for impressionist computery muck. the world of In the Lost Lands is inspiringly repugnant. this is not a George Miller-style post-apocalypse playground. you certainly wouldn't want to live here! not when every location on the map is called something like Evil Ridge or Scary Pit. it's very true to the spirit of GRRM narrative… more
Sydney🚀 (3★) · 446 likes
Part garish post-apocalyptic travelogue, part steampunk western, part dark fantasy epic, part creature feature, part video game cut scene, 100% PWSA being an insane person. The clunky dialogue might be more unbearable if the images and closeups weren’t so striking. They just let Dave Bautista keep his tattoos so his character canonically has a Blade Runner unicorn on his neck!! The fanatical religious villain wears aviators!! Milla Jovovich!! I did not hate it!!
comrade_yui (5★) · 388 likes
👁️ the eye of milla = the eye of providence 𓂀
everything in anderson's cinema extends from the vision of his beloved, a gaze which looms over these lost lands and pierces the veil of pomegranate secrets. finally we see her in a truer form: no longer the puppet of the umbrella corporation, but a moonstruck prophetess who has eternally safeguarded the post-human future from the dregs of fascist-feudalism and theocracy.
the viewer knows that alys (the true spelling of… more
SilentDawn (1.5★) · 384 likes
25
Jesus, this is dreadful. PWSA's sensibilities of unnatural landscapes, abstracted action, and video game fluidity reach a new level of garishness with In the Lost Lands. You can really feel the budget here, with z-grade compositing, stilted dialogue, stock performances and set-pieces. Anderson still knows his way around a gunfight and there are frazzled bursts of poetry in the mix, but certainly not enough to put In the Lost Lands in his highlight reel.
More thoughts here in podcast form.