Machines of Love (2020/1) is a hallucinogenic horror which lures us beneath a decaying Viking film set into a casino of buried aircrafts, continuing Jenkin van Zyl’s process of guerrilla filmmaking in abandoned Hollywood film sets. A sextet of ghouls arrive here on the promise of a Good Fantasy, setting in motion an erotic game of destruction and renewal. Caught in the Machines’ lottery of role-play, they breed cakes of their own likeness into the fuselage: a rush of passion that ends, inevitably, in a grisly conclusion. Attentive to the mutability and rotation of roles, the film free-falls through the terror, excitement, panic, and anticipation held within self-creation in a rumination on the enduring power and politics of fantasy.
