Director: Venus Patel
Release Year: 2023
“Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse” is not merely a film. It is a delirious sermon delivered with a wink, a howl, and a bedazzled megaphone. Venus Patel’s 2023 mockumentary takes the familiar architecture of a documentary and shakes it until only fragments remain, then rearranges those pieces into something anarchic and defiantly queer. The result is a film that interrogates the rituals of belief, the pressures of conformity, and the liberating power of gender disobedience while maintaining a tone that oscillates between the playful and the subversively profound.
Patel’s own background forms a crucial backbone of the film’s energy. Born in Los Angeles, living in Dublin, and carrying Indian and Latin American heritage, she has long crafted work that reflects the bizarre negotiations demanded of a transfemme person of colour moving through the world. Her films are steeped in the textures of lived experience, including the exhaustion of being observed, judged, and misread. They explore questions of bodily performance, the construction of persona, the threat of gender-based violence, and the protest traditions that pulse through queer histories. These thematic threads merge seamlessly in “Daisy” where the real and the fantastical collapse into one another, creating a space where irony and abjection coexist like mismatched earrings.
The film follows Daisy, portrayed with both exaggerated charm and razor clarity by Patel herself. Daisy has fled Texas after being rejected by her family, a familiar trauma transformed here into a mythic origin story. Ireland becomes her unlikely stage, a place where she can reinvent herself not by assimilating but by exploding expectations entirely. Her transformation begins on a mountaintop, where she encounters a queer goddess who appears less like a divine authority and more like a camp apparition, part celestial being and part drag prophet. The goddess entrusts Daisy with a sacred mission. The world is ending, and only those who renounce heterosexuality will be saved. The promise is not heaven or enlightenment but rebirth as monsters in a New Queer World. From the start, the film makes clear that the apocalypse can be hilarious, emancipatory, grotesque, and fabulous all at once.
Daisy descends from the mountain with the fervour of a televangelist who has swallowed a Pride parade whole. Sporting a cowboy hat, a white dress that seems to flutter with its own mischievous purpose, and a pink megaphone that doubles as her holy instrument, she moves through Dublin transforming the city into her pulpit. At bus stops and street corners, in public plazas and unexpected alleyways, she delivers energetic declarations about the doom awaiting the heteronormative order. Her voice is half prophecy, half performance art, yet her conviction never wavers. Instead of ridiculing belief itself, Patel uses Daisy's exaggerated theatrics to highlight how performative all ideologies can be when stripped of their solemn veneer.
As Daisy preaches, a curious group of followers forms around her. They are drawn not simply to her message but to the spectacle of her presence. With each new disciple, the film expands its critique of religious and charismatic authority. The followers reflect the vulnerability of those seeking community, the absurdity of dogma, and the simple human desire to belong to something bigger than oneself. Through this growing congregation, Patel exposes the mechanics of cults and organized faiths in a manner that is both playful and unsettling. Daisy, despite being a parody, carries the unmistakable aura of a leader whose charisma becomes its own form of power.
What makes the film brilliantly destabilizing is Patel’s refusal to let the audience settle into the comfort of satire alone. She weaves in her own lived realities, allowing Daisy’s camp exterior to crack just enough for the viewer to perceive the genuine pain and resilience beneath. The film ridicules the pressure to conform yet never loses sight of how punishing heteronormativity can be for those who do not or cannot fit its rigid shape. It is this dual motion, this ability to be uproariously funny while simultaneously exposing the violence embedded in societal norms, that gives the film its emotional punch.
Patel’s aesthetic vocabulary heightens this effect. Her costuming blends softness with swagger, a visual reclamation of femininity that defies tidy categorization. The film’s structure is elastic and unruly, borrowing documentary gestures only to mock them lightly before pulling the rug away. Scenes oscillate between realism and dream logic without warning. Interviews unfold with a seriousness that clashes against Daisy’s fantastical mission. Public preaching becomes both a protest and a parody of protest. The film’s texture mirrors the experience of living as a transfemme person whose identity is constantly scrutinized, misunderstood, or fetishized. Patel responds to that scrutiny by embracing exaggeration so thoroughly that it becomes a form of resistance. “Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse” ultimately positions queerness not as an identity but as a worldview that rejects the false binaries governing mainstream culture. In Daisy’s pseudo-religion, monstrosity becomes a sacred state, not something to fear but something to celebrate. The apocalypse becomes a cleansing fire that burns away conformity rather than humanity. By flipping the script on who deserves salvation, Patel forces the audience to confront the arbitrary moral hierarchies that shape their own world.
The film’s final effect is one of liberation. It frees the viewer from the expectation of coherence, inviting them instead into a space where absurdity has teeth and comedy becomes a weapon. Patel’s performance is both self-mythologizing and self-exposing, a reminder that queer art often survives by inhabiting contradictions. “Daisy” is an offering to those who have been pushed to the margins, a reminder that creation and destruction often travel together, and a radiant declaration that the end of the world can also be the beginning of a new one.
In its wildness, its irreverence, and its emotional sincerity, “Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse” stands as one of Patel’s most compelling works. It is a cinematic sermon delivered from the mountaintop of queer imagination, urging the world to shed its dull constraints and embrace the monstrous beauty waiting to be born.
Image credits: imdb.com
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