Gods of Their Own Religion is one of the first films, and perhaps the first feature film, to go against the grain of the official COVID narrative to which the UK’s cultural institutions and all their artists have sold their allegiance. Made during the first days of lockdown, which also provided its theme, Gods of Their Own Religion had its première at Cineworld Leicester Square last Thursday, and I was one of the 370 or so people who packed into the auditorium. I’d been invited to the screening of the ‘making of’ three weeks before, a short film titled No Budget, No Script, No Permission. Beforehand, I’d wondered why I was going to watch how a film was made before I’d seen the film; but even more than what I saw in the short, it was the energy of the people involved in its making that drew me to get tickets for the feature film.
From what I’d seen, I had expected a stylish heist film set in the emptied streets of lockdown London; but as the protagonists began to strut and fret their time across the screen, I began to feel uneasy. Beautiful girls with bee-stung lips, tattooed men with designer muscles and depilated boys in designer clothes: ‘F***ing hipsters!’ I thought. I know where they were under lockdown: sitting at home waiting for permission to leave, washing their hands of responsibility, designing masks to sell on E-bay, screaming at us on the street to keep our distance, denouncing the non-compliant across their numerous social media accounts, lending their carefully accumulated Instagram followings to the Government-funded campaigns to inject the population with experimental gene therapies. There were no heroes among the unfailingly obedient hipsters. And that’s no surprise, because as Intensive Care warned us 8 years ago now: ‘They’re just f***ing yuppies in disguise!’
In contrast to which, if I had to choose a ‘hero’ of lockdown, it would be Piers Corbyn, the 76-year-old astrophysicist who was the first to break lockdown regulations when the rest of London was cowering at home, and who, I’m delighted to report, was present at the première. But my first impressions, I’m happy to say, were wrong. The heroes of this film are not hipsters, and it’s not a heist movie. Gods of Their Own Religion is something very different and far better than that. So what is it?
To answer that I have to say something about the way the film looks and sounds. The cinematography of Stephen Roach is extraordinary, brilliant, adventurous. Across the vast 4DX extreme sensory cinema screen, barely a shot I can recall contained a field of vision in which every object was in focus. Far more typically a small focal point, and not always on an actor, was surrounded by a haze of blurred forms and colours; and in some of the more memorable sequences the whole screen dissolved into swirling abstractions that conjured something about the unreality and sickness of the suffocating world it was depicting. And that world was inseparable from the soundscape equally extraordinarily and creatively conjured into being by composer Greg Birkumshaw. Together, sound an image created an almost viscous atmosphere that reached out from the screen to envelop us in its neon-lit darkness, filled more with the murmurings of distance threats and interior fears than the muffled, hungover sounds of the empty cityscape of the film.
Films are always a collective endeavour, and great directors are invariably surrounded by a regular team of collaborators. If I were the director of this film, who one day may earn that description, I’d hold onto these two. And if I were one of the nine listed producers, I’d release a CD of the soundtrack of the film, because I wouldn’t be the only one to buy it.
And what of the director, Naeem Mahmood, whom I wasn’t aware of before this, but who already has a considerable following and appears to have acquired a well-deserved reputation both as an auteur and a force of nature. It is typical of Naeem’s generous nature that, in his introduction to the film, he identified his mother as the real executive producer, because it was her biryanis, he said, that kept cast, crew and extras going through the long days and nights of the shoot. But modesty aside, it is Naeem’s vision that binds cinematography to soundscape, and into which the unsuspecting actors have been thrown.
When the ‘making of’ film described Gods of Their Own Religion as made without a script, I thought it meant that the script was written as the film was made, a practice employed by, for example, the great Hong Kong director Won Kar-Wai. But again I was wrong. The entire script of the film could be typed on one side of an A4 sheet of paper, and by far most of that is said by the insane and sinister technocrat, played by Ewan Henderson — a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of Chris Whitty, Neil Ferguson and Matt Hancock — whose pronouncements don’t quite repeat, but are recognisable from, the scientific absurdities and downright lies by which we were ruled for two years.
This lack of a script leaves the protagonists of the film in something of a quandary. How to tell a story without words? As Kyd Nereida, who plays the heroine ‘Kid’, asked in No Budget, No Script, No Permission: ‘I’m an actor, and I have to write my own dialogue too!’ Together with Ricki Hall, who plays the brooding ‘King’ of the outlaw gang, Christopher Chung, who plays their new recruit, ‘C2’, and Michael Hagan, who plays the ‘Oracle’, our heroes say almost nothing, to each other or anybody else. The little they do say sounded like words the actors had made up on the spot. But that was okay, because it felt very much as if each of them had prepared all their lives for their respective roles, which gave their performances an edge.
In particular, Kyd Nereida, who looks and sounds like one of those Dalston girls you’d like to strangle with their own clothes, skilfully and bravely conveys both the arrogance and vulnerability of her character, ending in a scene of genuine pathos and tragedy. There is a plot of sorts, which I won’t divulge here because for some viewers it will still be important to their enjoyment of the film, but its primary theme is betrayal. For those looking for a tale of rebellion conforming to the Hollywood stereotype of the kick-ass heroine, you’ll be disappointed. This isn’t a story that ends well.
But I’ll give you what I think is a clue to how it unfolds. I had thought that the character of ‘C2’, who as a rebellious council-estate child (played by Sunny Mahmood) was abducted by the state, was named as such to indicate how his individuality had been taken from him and reduced instead to a code — a little like the androids in the Star Wars movies. But when he is introduced by Kid, his lost childhood friend (played by Aaliyah Clews Hall), to the gang of the non-compliant led by the character of ‘King’, she says something like: ‘King: C2’. I don’t know if Naeem Mahmood is a chess player, but I’d guess — hopefully without giving the plot away — that this is a reference to how C2, which is a square occupied by a white pawn in the starting positions of the game of chess, will become, by the end of the movie, a very different piece on the board.
Perhaps I’m over-interpreting — although there are no limits to the interpretation of the science fiction by which we’re ruled today — but the move C2-C4, in which the queen’s bishop’s pawn move forward two spaces, is known in Chess as the ‘English Opening’, and frees the white queen to move aggressively into action, while also making her vulnerable to attack. It might also explain why the character of ‘Kid’, who in more ways than one is the queen of this movie, moves so quickly and decisively — most obviously in the Hatton Garden jewellery heist — while the pawn and king appear immobile in comparison. I won’t say any more for fear of ruining the ending, but when looking at the film’s final scene, in which the masked compliant kneel in regimented rows on a City of London square, ask yourself what position C2 occupies now.
But if the film takes some of its narrative structure and the dramatic arc of its characters from a game of chess, what is the film about? What game is being played here? I’ve always thought that, to see what a past decade looked like, watch the films it made about the future. Is there a better image of the early 1960s than the first Star Trek television series? Or a better image of the 1980s than Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner — a film which Naeem Mahmood’s strongly evokes? And like that ground-breaking film, Gods of Their Own Religion is set in a dystopian near-future that is probably the best cinematic depiction of our present I’ve seen.
It was a reminder of the madness that descended upon us and will no doubt descend again to see what a classroom, a street, a square, a hillside of people wearing medical masks over their faces looks like, their terrified and furious eyes staring in blank obedience or, in one of the more Surrealist images in the film, their eyes bandaged into blindness. Did we really allow our children to be masked for two years, placed behind Perspex screens and indoctrinated by their teachers into fear of each other and hatred of the non-compliant? Did we really allow the police and doctors to tear our loved ones from our side and prohibit us from seeing them on the grounds that it was to protect public health? Did our friends and lovers really tell us — as C2’s girlfriend tells him in the film — that if we loved them we must keep our distance? Or are these just images from some science-fiction horror movie? No, Gods of Their Own Religion reminds us, we did all of that and far worse. The horror movie is our recent past, and our friends, family and neighbours were the monsters.
I don’t know if Naeem has a more than usually large social media following, but there was a huge turnout to the première of Gods of Their Owen Religion, but I recognised only a handful of them. Who were these heroes of the resistance I didn’t know? And why were they turned out so stylishly for this dark trip down memory lane? Were they extras? Film buffs? Industry insiders? Hangers-on looking to appear in some society rag?
As the film left us in its all-too-real and downbeat ending and the lights went up in the auditorium, I expected a huge round of applause from the audience of friends, followers and supporters. I hope I won’t embarrass Naeem when I say that, although many of us clapped loud and long for what we had just seen, the majority of the audience were unexpectedly silent, gave at most a peremptory clap, and then shuffled out with their beautifully coiffured tails between their legs. I was surprised at this response, and it took me a while to figure out where it came from.
As the destruction caused by lockdown becomes more undeniable to even the most faithful worshippers in the Church of COVID, the excess deaths from the gene therapies mount up, and the next phase of the Great Reset unrolls before our eyes, it’s become fashionable to claim that — of course! — I was always against lockdown, mandatory masking and medical intervention as a condition of the return of our freedoms.
But I remember — because I was one of them — how few of us there were to defy those who had elected themselves Gods of a religion whose dogma we were expected and forced to obey. It wasn’t quite as few as the gang of misfits in this film, but it wasn’t many more. I have little doubt that most of the people in the audience last Thursday evening rigorously observed lockdown restrictions, zealously masked up wherever they were told to, obediently injected themselves and their children with the experimental gene therapies, and viciously denounced the non-compliant as ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘COVID-deniers’, ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘granny killers’ and much, much worse.
So I imagine that, when they booked tickets to Gods of Their Own Religion, they thought they were going for an entertaining night out, and that Naeem Mahmood was going to depict them as heroes, struggling through a terrible pandemic with fortitude, resilience and unselfish dedication to what the Government assured them was the ‘common good’. What they were shown, instead, was an all-too-real image of themselves and what they had participated in normalising, and it wasn’t pretty.
Even more than the dystopian future it has conjured onto the screen and through the air for our pleasure and horror, Gods of Their Own Religion is a record of what, as a society, we did to each other, and what, as a society, lies ahead if we continue to comply with these self-elected deities. This makes it, for my money, the most important of the post-COVID films I’ve seen. We don’t need another COVID Inquiry to white-wash the wall of our collaboration, post-lockdown equivalents to the sort of propaganda that filled our cinemas after 9/11. The applause this film so richly deserves but didn’t receive is the token of its authenticity and the integrity of its makers, and I hope Naeem and his fellow artists will wear it as a badge of honour.
In the climate of censorship we’ve so readily accepted in the guise of what the film refers to as the ‘New Abnormal’, I don’t know if Gods of Their Own Religion will be screened in UK cinemas; but I fervently hope it is, because this is an important film that the people of Britain need to see. If it doesn’t — and what will the UK biosecurity state not do to keep the population ignorant and compliant? — get the DVD, play it to your friends, make this an underground classic. And if a cinema house is brave enough to screen it, go and see it.
As the technologies and programmes of our enslavement are implemented outside of any democratic process, transparency or accountability and without a mandate from those they are designed to imprison, more and more people are asking what we can do to resist, and one day, perhaps, to overthrow those forging the chains that will bind us. Gods of Their Own Religion offers two answers.
One answer is the refusal to comply with the absurdity and obscenity of the digital camp in which we will be imprisoned by Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency, 15-Minute Cities, Facial Recognition technology, Agenda 2030, the Pandemic Treaty and all the other apparatuses of the Great Reset.
But the other, and perhaps more profound answer, is the spirit of creativity, independence and disobedience with which the more than 230 crew, cast and extras who made this film under the most oppressive restrictions on our freedoms we’ve ever had in this country without a budget, without a script and without permission. Because it is with our passively-granted permission, with a budget drawn from our taxes, and to a script written for us by people we never elected to power, that the Global Biosecurity State is being constructed around, between and within us.
How do we resist and destroy this dystopian future that is almost our present? The answer is as easy as making this brave and defiant film. Gods of Their Own Religion is a training manual for our future freedoms.
Gods of Their Own Religion will be having its Welsh Premiere at Cinema & Co in Swansea on Saturday 9 December. Book tickets here: ticket247.co.uk/Event/
Simon Elmer is the author of The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism. His recent books include The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022), as well as two volumes of articles on the UK biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, both published in 2023.
Unity News Network (UNN) Staff Writer | To find out more details about our staff, please head to the About Us section on our website.
