Gregg Araki's Fabulation Is A Small Film That Catches You Off Guard
Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine is a 2018 film by Gregg Araki that most people scroll past because the promotional material makes it look like a generic post-apocalyptic drama. It is not. Matt Stokoe plays Undine, a transgender man who works as an outcast in a near-future Los Angeles where a mysterious plague has hollowed out civilization. He lives in a squatted building, sells contraband, and keeps to himself. Then a woman arrives, and everything shifts. The film plays like a ghost story dressed as a queer romantic comedy set during the collapse of society. Araki shoots it on a tiny budget, which is visible in almost every frame. But that limitation works in the film's favor. The emptiness of the locations mirrors the emotional emptiness Undine carries around. When the camera lingers on him alone in a vacant office park or a cracked swimming pool, it feels intentional rather than cheap.
What Fabulation Or The Re Education Of Undine Actually Gets Right
The central relationship between Undine and the woman who finds him is the engine of the whole movie, and Matt Stokoe carries it almost entirely on his own. His performance is quiet, restrained, and occasionally funny without trying to be. Araki gives him space to breathe. The supporting cast, including Mena Suvari and David Del Rio, show up when needed but never steal focus. That restraint is uncommon for a director who built his career on loud, chaotic queer filmmaking like Totally Fucked Up and The Kids Are All Right. This is a grown-up Araki, and it shows. What surprises people is how much the film engages with trans identity without making it the entire plot. Undine's transition history exists in the world the way other people's histories exist. It is referenced, it matters, but it does not dominate every scene. That normalization is rare in indie films of this budget level. Most productions either ignore trans experience entirely or turn it into trauma porn. This one sits somewhere in the middle, closer to ordinary than to exotic.
Where The Film Stumbles
The second half drags. The plague backstory that Araki teases throughout never gets a satisfying explanation, and some viewers will find that acceptable ambiguity while others will find it lazy. I ran into this exact problem when showing it to a friend who kept pausing to ask what actually caused the epidemic. I had no better answer than "the script does not say." That is a legitimate criticism, not a missing detail. The film asks you to accept certain gaps and move on, which works emotionally but not narratively. The romantic subplot also moves slower than it needs to. There are long stretches of silence that could have been trimmed without losing any meaning. At under ninety minutes total runtime, I would have cut fifteen minutes easily. The pacing choice is probably deliberate, but deliberate does not always equal effective.
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Where To Watch It
Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine has rotated through several streaming platforms since its 2018 premiere. It has appeared on Shudder, Amazon Prime Video, and various independent film services. Your availability depends on your region and the current licensing deals, which change without notice. The most reliable approach is to check JustWatch or similar aggregator tools before committing to a purchase. Physical media releases are scarce, and Araki's distribution model tends to favor digital over DVD or Blu-ray for smaller titles. If you are looking to download the film through unofficial channels, I will not link those. Pirated copies also tend to have terrible audio quality on this particular release, so the experience is usually worse than waiting a month for it to cycle back onto a legal platform.
Who Should Actually Watch This
This is not a horror movie despite the post-apocalyptic setting. It is not a buddy comedy either, though there are moments that land close to one. The closest reference point might be a slow-character drama that happens to exist inside a world where society has already folded. If you enjoy films like Only Lovers Left Alive or The Disaster Artist in terms of tone and pacing, you will likely appreciate this. If you want plot-driven spectacle, this is the wrong entry point. The film also functions as a reasonable standalone piece even if you have never seen any of Araki's earlier New Queer Cinema work from the nineties. You do not need context to understand what is happening on screen. What you will need is patience for a movie that trusts its audience to sit with quiet moments instead of filling every gap with exposition or music cues. That patience usually pays off around the midpoint, when the emotional core of the film finally snaps into place. After that, the remaining time feels earned rather than dragged out. The final sequence, which I will not describe here, is the strongest in the entire movie. It justifies nearly everything that comes before it.
