Four years after her previous feature, The Silent Twins, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska returns to the big screen with her newest film, Hot Spot, which initially premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival last month.
Gaining international recognition for her wonderful mermaid horror musical, The Lure (2015), Smoczynska once again boldly experiments with mixing genres and tones: Hot Spot is a cyberpunk sci-fi with a little bit of mystery and a whole lot of family drama.
It's a film filled with so many cool concepts and visuals that you actively want to love it all. Unfortunately, it’s also a film that becomes progressively harder to actually enjoy as it abandons its initial premise in favor of too many ideas at once.
At the beginning of Hot Spot, we are introduced to another version of a dystopian future on this long-suffering planet. We’re familiar with the basics: the aftermath of a global catastrophe, the resulting limited resources, and a transactional system in place that distributes said resources and serves as a basis for a totalitarian state.
The specifics here are curious, though. In this world, most humans are connected to the Head, a sentient AI that allows them to communicate telepathically and monitors everyone’s vitals at all times, constantly throwing in various recommendations.
The film’s protagonist is Djonny (Andrzej Konopka), a detective with a penchant for making strong fashion statements (both his white leather number and his kilt outfit are among the most memorable imagery in the film). While Djonny seems to be content to comply with the system that only requires the plugged-in humans to take a specific jellybean every morning (lest they want their heads to literally explode), his wife, Ayka (Reika Kirishima), a popular singer, questions the order of things and has an ability to disconnect from the Head at will.
The story kicks off with Djonny being assigned a new case: a ritualistic murder that happened at a camp, where a group of anti-AI, non-connected refugees has recently arrived. The detective immediately sets his attention and suspicions on one of these women, Rana (Noomi Rapace), who also seems to possess some interesting abilities.
On paper, all of this sounds pretty exciting, but the reality is that the supposed mystery mostly serves as an excuse to introduce Rana, and then to inexplicably sideline her for most of the runtime, as if to overcompensate for the fact that the last time Rapace appeared in a dystopian movie, there were seven versions of her on screen. The murder gets solved almost immediately, after which the film promptly proceeds to start losing its plot, quite literally.
Interestingly, Robert Bolesto’s screenplay, which was written five years ago, doesn’t feel the slightest bit outdated, but the way this story translates on screen in Smoczynska’s film mostly feels exhaustingly inconsistent. It’s honestly hard not to have some respect for the movie that just keeps throwing around ideas and visuals, whether they actually blend together or not. Anti-AI psychics! Blood-sucking worms that people in this reality have both as pets and as the executioners of death penalties! Europe’s The Final Countdown! A digital ghost of a dead grandma who comes in to babysit! A character that wears elven ears!
On the other hand, you can’t help but wish the authors would choose one vein to tap into and stick to it. The back half of the film seems to be less interested in societal anxieties or losing your autonomy to AI, and more in a troubled marriage and the invisible dysfunctions inside it. There are some interesting psychosexual undertones buried underneath stylistic flourishes, but they never get fully explored because there is always other cool stuff to show.
Here is a thought no film critic ever thinks they’d get to type out: Watching a dystopian version of Scenes from a Marriage, with mutant worms and an epic masturbation session, is not as entertaining as you may be imagining.
The film opens Friday, August 21, only in movie theaters, via Focus Featurs. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.