Mad God (2021)

Various people build and climb their way up a tall tower reaching toward a red, stormy sky before the tower is struck down.

A tall figure shrouded in a jacket and gas mask, credited as the Assassin, descends into a ruined, dystopian world via a diving bell. In his possession are a map and a briefcase. Traveling through the underworld, he encounters monstrous creatures mercilessly preyed upon by larger beasts and elaborate torture machines. Eventually, he reaches a city inhabited by an army of faceless drones constructed from feces, who mindlessly tend to physically laborious tasks, often dying in the process. When they begin to hear the cries and babbles of a baby, they abandon their tasks and wander towards the source – a tower containing screens displaying closeups of the being's eyes and bloody mouth. The Assassin joins them and briefly stares at a lone drone, but retreats into a trap door when a bipedal monstrosity beats and stomps on the drone. Deeper within the city, the Assassin discovers a mountain of briefcases just like his own. He opens his briefcase and takes out a time bomb, which he places and prepares to set off. He fails to notice a creeping monster behind him, which then attacks and drags him away as the bomb's ticking hand appears unable to complete its circuit.

The Assassin is shackled to a table and skinned in front of a mass of spectators, who watch his silhouette in a theater and laugh. He is revealed to be one of many fully skinned and bandaged figures laying on an operating table in a hospital. His exposed, bloodshot eye glances around, noticing the shadows of people in the hallway. A surgeon enters the Assassin's room with a nurse, cuts open his abdomen, and begins rummaging inside, pulling out jewelry and papers and throwing them to the floor. Eventually, the surgeon finds a wailing, infant larva-like creature, which he hands to the nurse, who carries it away.

The surgeon bores a hole in the Assassin's head and connects his brain to a television set. The surgeon watches the television, which depicts the world above, where a man known as the Last Man puts on a yarmulke and black slippers and looks under a table, where three gnarled witches cut a string before handing the Last Man a map. The Last Man enters a large room filled with figures dressed like the Assassin standing to attention. He gives his map to an Assassin who is waiting in the diving bell in the center of the room. The new Assassin takes it and descends to a ruined city where he checks his map. He grabs a nearby motorcycle which he rides until it breaks down, only then driving what is seemingly a rusted light utility vehicle. The Assassin follows the map descending through thousands of years of carnage and filth created by war, through a munitions depot, a graveyard and a war zone before descending a spiral roadway.

Back in the underworld, the nurse brings the infant to a ghostly, floating plague doctor, who escorts the child to an alchemist's lair. The alchemist grinds the infant into a powder, alchemically transforms the powder into gold, and uses the gold to create a new cosmos which undergoes the same cycle of evolution, civilization and self-destruction as the previous one. In doing so, the bomb's countdown concludes, and time rapidly progresses, with all kinds of clocks, hourglasses, and candles suddenly shifting forward.