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.

Machines of Love is a film directed by Jenkin van Zyl, starring Alex Margo Arden as Number 97, Emmanuel Awuni as Number 29, Kevin Brennan as Number 163, Danielle Goldman and Eugenia Shishkina as Number 2, Slid Needham as Number 310 and Ted Rodgers as Number 237 (with snow Number 237 played by Jenkin van Zyl.) With editing, sound, set, costume and camera operation by Jenkin van Zyl, cakes by Magda Viljoen, title from ‘Machines of Love’ by Brittany Newell, and made with special thanks to the assistance on set by Liv Preston, Magda Viljoen and Betsie van Zyl.