Fantasia 2024 Review: INFINITE SUMMER, A Young Woman Takes A Mighty Trip In Miguel Llansó's Latest

A young woman’s transition from high school to university gets hijacked by a global conspiracy – and some wild new drugs – in director Miguel Llansó’s third feature, Infinite Summer, premiering this week at the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock) decides to spent some time with her best friend Grete (Johanna Rosin) are too to a rural cabin to enjoy a summer of freedom. Grete is a bit older and has just returned from London, she brings with her a much older friend, Sarah (Hannah Gross), who sees Mia as an innocent ripe for corruption. When her friends reach out to the local hippie drug dealer – or as he prefers, “meditation teacher – Dr. Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies), he sends them on the trip of a lifetime with a new high that involves not only psychedelics, but also some cutting-edge AR technology that none of them truly understand. However, that’s not going to stop them from giving it a try, and before long they are being hunted by oddball Interpol officers as the world around them begins to crumble.

It’s a wild film throwing around some very heady ideas, but it’s also Miguel Llansó’s most audience friendly project to date, making it an odd mix of concept, tone, and execution. Coming from a background in retro-futurism like the science fiction odysseys of Crumbs and particularly the cut and paste aesthetic of Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway, Llansó makes a concerted effort to ground Infinite Summer in a more recognizable reality than those previous mindfucks.

To a large extent he is successful, with Infinite Summer the handmade production design that characterized his early work is replaced with a more modern aesthetic. Gone are is the artifice that dominates his prior work, instead we have actors delivering relatable performances, characters who feel real, even in the most bizarre circumstances, and a narrative that – though certainly complex – follows a more or less standard linear timeline. These elements, which would be standard for other filmmakers, represent a massive change for Llansó, but for those who may worry that this means losing what they love about his work, rest assured, Infinite Summer is still pretty damned weird.

The film’s success relies heavily on Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock’s performance as Mia, she is our surrogate, a neophyte to the mind-altering drug technology of this world, we are led through Llansó’s psychedelic wonderland by her hand. Far from a completely blank slate, Mia is set up as an incredibly astute scholar – she won an award at school for “best student” – and an empathetic presence that you want to spend time with. So, when she gets swept up in this conspiracy around global transhumanism, the transition from the physical plane to something beyond, and attempting to wrench her friends from the grasp of nefarious manipulators, we are along for the ride.

Llansó uses this untested, mysterious new technology to explore Mia’s coming of age journey. She is constantly taking blind steps into the future, she sees what is on the other side of her maturation, Grete and Sarah’s devil-may-care attitudes represent one option for the path she could take (perhaps not exactly what Mia is looking for), but it’s the passage itself that scares her. Likewise, Mia’s father, played by Ivo Uukkivi, is just as excited and hesitant for her to find her future, but he fears this new tech that he doesn’t understand, and that’s a fear that many adults have when attempting to relate to anyone younger than themselves, especially their own children.

To say that Infinite Summer’s slicker production values and more traditional storytelling represents an evolution in Llansó’s filmmaking is not entirely correct. The man who broke your brain in Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway is still very much present, but he’s experimenting with new tools, a bigger budget, and better access. There’s clearly a desire to reach out to a broader audience with Infinite Summer, and with its thematic similarities to the work of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (The Endless), it’s clear that there is an audience that is willing to take the ride. However, that moderate shift toward populism doesn’t mean that Llansó has left the big ideas behind, in Infinite Summer they are more well defined, but the film still leaves room for interpretation and will definitely spark plenty of post-screening discussion. If anything, Infinite Summer is impressive evidence that Llansó cannot be pigeonholed into any single aesthetic mode, and it will be interesting to not only see what audiences think of it, but to now imagine the world of opportunities that will open up for this filmmaker with a growing and diverse resume.