Agnieszka Smoczyńska‘s bonkers but disjointed sci-fi film Hot Spot imagines a future in which society is completely controlled by, what else, Artificial Intelligence. The AI in this world is known as “The Head”, and its dominance is absolute. It allows the people to speak to one another telepathically through a neural network. Pretty cool, and convenient. But The Head also monitors anything and everything that people do, including the clothes they wear, the energy they consume, and the “jellybean” they are forced to eat each day. Refuse to eat it, and…well…*KABOOM*!!!
In this cyberpunk dystopia exists an ’80s-style retro future, which is perhaps the most unique aspect of Hot Spot. Polish actor Andrzej Konopka (who worked with Smoczyńska in The Lure) stars as Djonny, a detective working for The Head. This guy is quite a character. A middle-aged dude with a bleach-blonde mullet and a dad bod, constantly rockin’ out to “The Final Countdown”, Djonny turns heads wherever he goes. He kind of looks like a joke, which makes it unclear whether we’re to take him, or the film, seriously at all. The Head takes him seriously enough that Djonny and his family; singer wife Ayka (Reika Kirishima) and son Zen (George Aurimas Cris) live in relative luxury compared to others in the desert landscape of an environment destroyed by climate change.
Djonny is sort of the “happy warrior” of Hot Spot, at least for a time. He’s tasked by The Head with investigating a ritual murder, which he quickly learns was committed by an anti-tech cult and a “cyberwitch” Rana, played by the film’s biggest name, Noomi Rapace. The group fights against control by The Head, and it isn’t long before Rana’s voodoo begins to affect Djonny’s home life. Ayka is already resisting The Head in small ways within her power, so this only complicates things further.
There are some interesting ideas in Hot Spot; a film that takes elements of Blade Runner, Dune, and other sci-fi classics and presents them through Smoczyńska’s European perspective. The ideas it presents, about a struggling society that has given up its independence for the promise of AI-dominated safety, aren’t particularly novel, but pairing it with a murder mystery is an intriguing approach.
Unfortunately, the mystery doesn’t last very long, and the rest of Hot Spot is a belabored fever dream of weird, disconnected imagery and random supporting characters. Djonny’s partner, who appears to be an elf with long elven ears, goes completely unexplained (are there other races in this world???), AI avatars of dead people connected to Djonny, occasional tiger attacks…it’s all a hallucinogenic mess that the film gets bogged down in.
While Hot Spot might prove successful overseas, a major hurdle for it here in the U.S. is the language barrier. Sure, the film is completely in a form of “broken English”, spoken by foreign actors who aren’t completely comfortable with it. Konopka, already a weird choice to be the lead, is tough to understand and should probably have had his dialogue subtitled. Given that Robert Bolesto’s screenplay is already dense, it doesn’t make for a good combination. Rapace has more experience than most, and she handles it pretty well, but to be fair, Rana doesn’t have a ton to say. She’s more of an enigmatic presence than anything else, which is the kind of character Rapace is so good at playing.
Hot Spot only feels like an audacious effort because so many American filmmakers choose to play it safe within this genre. Foreign directors are less restrained. I think of Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets as examples of maximalist sci-fi, and this film fits the bill. There’s a lot to respect about Hot Spot‘s abundance of style and Rapace’s magnetism, but the ambiguity of plot and discourse will leave many sci-fi fans with a chill.
Hot Spot opens in theaters August 21st from Focus Features.
