Hot Spot’s Vision of an AI-Controlled Future is Frustratingly Unclear
Despite a premise that combines Blade Runner and Dune, this Noomi Rapace sci-fi movie starts wacky and ends incoherent.
Hot Spot was written five years ago, one year before the launch of ChatGPT. The delay isn’t notable in itself; there are movies that take decades to make it from script to screen. What’s interesting about Robert Bolesto’s screenplay for this ambitious, but flawed, sci-fi film by Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska is that it anticipates a world where every human thought and feeling is monitored by, filtered through, and outsourced to artificial intelligence.
In the world of the film, the sentient AI who controls every aspect of life is called “the Head.” Characters can communicate with each other telepathically through the neural network, which also means that the Head is listening to everything everyone says. (The Head’s control is so absolute that a character is admonished to put some clothes on after the machine registers a drop in her skin temperature.) Citizens of this unnamed near-future society are also required to connect to the Head in order to eat, drink, and obtain access to energy, making the Head the de facto dictator of an AI-powered totalitarian state.
Within this framework, human beings with no other choice — and, in the younger generations, no memory of life before the Head — carry on with their lives. Homicide detective Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) and his wife Ayka (Reika Kirishima), a popular singer, are two of them: They’ve been deemed useful enough to the Head to live in a Brutalist concrete bunker on the outskirts of the city, where they raise their son Zen (George Aurimas Cris) amidst dried-up rivers and dead trees. The parched, barren landscape that surrounds the characters is another of Hot Spot’s prophetic moments: Climate change was already set to turn Earth into a desert planet in 2021, but AI data centers are now accelerating that transformation.
Djonny in Hot Spot.
The desert setting also lends Hot Spot an aesthetic similar to that of Legendary’s Dune movies, complete with a group of Bene Gesserit-esque anti-AI mystics who dress in flowing robes and cover half of their faces to obstruct facial recognition software. This is, admittedly, pretty cool, as are the gender-bending cyberpunk fashions worn by the Head’s interconnected subjects. (One supporting character, a translator who assists Djonny on a case, has the pink hair and elf ears of an anime character.)
The idea of using competing visions of the future to indicate class conflict in a near-future dystopia is a compelling one, and combining it with a Blade Runner-esque mystery plot makes for an entertainingly bonkers viewing experience in the film’s first third. Then the grisly murder that introduces Djonny to Rena (Noomi Rapace), an anti-Head zealot living off the grid in the ruins of an abandoned airport, is solved, and Hot Spot begins to lose its way.
One of the weaker aspects of Hot Spot is that it doesn’t articulate the sinister side of the film’s all-seeing AI very well, effectively kneecapping its own stakes as the plot drifts towards Ayka and Rena’s psychic battle against the Head. Humans with the ability to disrupt the network with their minds exist in this universe, but their powers are frustratingly inconsistent as well: Early on, for example, the Head refers to Rena as a “cyber witch.” She insists she’s just a regular one, but the label sticks, with heavy consequences later on in the film. So was she a cyber witch? If not, do they actually exist? What is a cyber witch, anyway?
Why a tiger? Your guess is as good as ours.
This is just a small detail, but there are many of them, and they add up. With the initial plot neatly wrapped up and over an hour of screen time to go, Smoczyńska begins to lose interest in the plot of Hot Spot, concentrating instead on cool visuals and heady symbolism. Details like the AI avatar of Djonny’s dead mother who babysits Zen when his parents are busy appear and disappear before we can even begin to unpack them. And the bloody finale does little to clarify what we’ve just seen, leaving viewers scratching their heads as the credits start to roll.
The multi-national cast all deliver dialogue in English, with varying degrees of fluency: Konopka, who worked with Smoczyńska on her film The Lure, has appeared in English-language films before, but this is Kirishima’s first English-language role. The dialogue scenes can be difficult to parse, and while Rapace obviously has no problem performing in English — most of her career has been outside of her native Sweden — she disappears from the narrative for long periods of time. (She’s also the best and most magnetic actor in the ensemble, making her absence even more noticeable.) If the story had a stronger through line, the language barrier might not have been an issue. But as it is this decision, presumably made to improve the film’s prospects in North American theaters, confuses Hot Spot even more.
Add in some mediocre VFX work, and you have the type of film critics sometimes refer to as a “big swing.” Hot Spot is an audacious movie, to be sure; the needle drops alone display the kind of no-holds-barred decision-making that you have to respect, even when it doesn’t connect with you. For better or for worse, it feels very European, both in the amount of onscreen nudity and its bizarre aesthetic sensibilities. For fans of visionary sci-fi with a high tolerance for ambiguity, it might be worth the 101 minutes. But on the whole, it’s more fun to describe than it is to watch.
