Within the last few years amid the emergence of AI, a number
of fictional as well as nonfiction films have addressed the dilemma ahead, whether
it be Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die or more recently
Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy. While
the subgenre is one that has been beaten to death all the way back to 2001:
A Space Odyssey or THX:1138 amid the rise of dystopian Ozploitation
ala Mad Max which also gave way to things like Neil Marshall’s ill-fated
Doomsday, the urgency behind grafting pop entertainments out of man
losing the battle against manmade machinery has paved the way for more like
minded cinematic fare.
When I first saw
the trailer for Hot Spot, from the outset it looked like yet another
entry into that arena of grim harbingers of things to come, another Furiosa if
it were directed by Neveldine/Taylor tag teaming enfant terrible. Then that tagline ‘from the director of The Lure’ flashed onscreen and everything clicked into high gear as I prepared
for effectively Agnieszka
Smoczyńska’s fourth Polish Film Institute feature
of psychotronic feminist phantasmagorical uncompromising horror.
In another near-distant dystopian, oppressive future presided
over by sentient A.I., a white-suited curly-haired private eye named Jan 623 (The
Lure drummer and director’s husband Andrzej Konopka) finds himself zeroing
in on some sort of cult of cloaked rebels intent on overthrowing the digital
empire following a brutal murder case.
Characters in this universe through sound waves are able to jump in and
out of other characters’ minds and read their background information telepathically
outside of times officers use sonic blasts to quell mind jumping, resulting in
a high-pitched ear-splitting frequency akin to ringing in one’s ears.
As he draws closer to the case, minding time
at home with his son Zen (George Aurimas Cris) and his disfigured wife Ayka
(Reika Kirishima), a major clue to solving this murder case arises in the form
of a refugee named Rana (Noomi Rapace) who may hold the key to this future’s medical
drug supply units which are administered to keep mind jumping from exploding
people’s heads in bloody Scanners-like crimson fountains.
Penned by The Lure screenwriter Robert Bolesto,
lensed by recurring collaborative cinematographer Jakub Kijowski who shot all
of her films and scored again by composers/songwriters Marcin Macuk and Zuzanna
Wronska, the new Agnieszka
Smoczyńska epic is every bit as sensorily
overwhelming, kinetically challenging and artistically uncompromising,
penetrative masterwork as her prior three.
Though an English language sci-fi A.I. era romp, this is every bit as
uncommercial and bold as what’s come before and is fully shot in both Greece
and Poland.
Yeah some of the creature
worm effects will remind viewers of Starship Troopers and more recently Mickey
17, but make no mistake, this doesn’t play nice in the sandbox like those
ones do. Violent, dark and even cruel
with a nebulous pure cinema non-narrative sharing the same headspace as Nicolas
Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, it’s a feminine journey inward through futuristic
science-fiction infused neo-noir. By and
large the director’s most expensive and ambitious effort to date, in theory it
should plug into that George Miller resurgence while in practice it channels
the sickly intimately discomforting body horror of David Cronenberg far harder
and more heavily than his offspring have.
As expected, when plugged into the mainstream movie
marketplace amid The Odyssey, Spider Man: Brand New Day or even Teenage
Sex and Death in Camp Miasma, something like Hot Spot is bound to
get lost in the shuffle and was more or less met with harshly negative
criticism. For someone going into this
primed and ready for hard boiled thinking man’s science fiction, audiences are
in for something a lot more aggressively bizarre and probing in and around your
buttons. Those of us who were blown away
by The Lure, Fugue and The Silent Twins however will not
be disappointed just how far inward this thing goes.
While it is indeed a shame the magnetic
attractiveness of Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s work hasn’t quite caught on with Western audiences
just yet, in time like her others Hot Spot will be recognized as another
bold and daring masterwork from in my opinion Poland’s best and boldest new
filmmaker. No this will clearly not work
for everyone and is not an easy experience but as a Polish American cinephile already
versed on her work it was an exciting and invigorating watch. One day the rest of the filmgoing public will
give it a fair handshake.
--Andrew Kotwicki