Gregg Araki is back home again. After forays into serious drama with his career-best work in Mysterious Skin, then stoner comedy in Smiley Face, Kaboom finds Araki in the territory occupied by his defining mid-’90s “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy“. Namely, teens, sex, violence, more sex, and finally, more sex. Oh! And an apocalypse! Where those previous films were more tonally apocalyptic, this one is more literal about it.

This is a vaguely Lynchian thriller — with snarky comedic twists — about a group of college kids gradually sucked into a bizarre cult conspiracy. When, of course, they’re not sucking any available appendage on the nearest warm body. (Did I mention there’s a fair amount of sex?) That conspiracy may or may not be a weird shared dream, or hallucination. When our humble narrator, Smith (Thomas Dekker), begins seeing things in the real world that reflect dreams he’s been having, he’s not sure if his imagination is playing tricks, particularly since he’s under the influence of some powerful psychotropics the first time it happens.

Smith and his best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) are college freshman at an unnamed California university, and Araki has fun putting them through the nervous, self-conscious experimentation of college. When Smith shows up at a party in a beret, and looks abashed when asked about it, it’s clear he’s consciously trying something out here. It’s all part of the process of figuring out who he is, as surely as is the random sex with strangers of both sexes that he engages in as he tries to determine a more concrete answer to the constant question he seems to receive about his sexual orientation — despite his insistence that he doesn’t believe in labels.