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DIRECTED BY: Agnieszka Smoczynska

FEATURING: Andrzej Konopka, Reika Kirishima, Noomi Rapace

PLOT: A detective living in a city run by a totalitarian AI, surrounded by wastelands, investigates a murder at a refugee camp and a series of cyberattacks that are accelerating the rate at which citizen’s heads are exploding.

COMMENTS: Agnieszka Smoczynska‘s Hot Spot has been getting slaughtered at Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, but I’m happy to report that, while it’s no The Lure, it’s a perfectly enjoyable, if strenuously unserious, midnight movie, an experience sort of like getting heat stroke at drive-in triple feature of Mad Max, Ghost in the Shell, and David Lynch‘s version of Dune. Do not attempt to take it seriously as science fiction; just enjoy the unexpected insanity and oddball directorial decisions, and you should find it a perfectly acceptable meat-and-potatoes weird movie.

Hot Spot‘s world-building is impressive, if frequently frustrating in its refusal to follow up on details. It’s set in a wealthy city surrounded by an endless wasteland, whose residents depend on near-omnipotent AI “the Head” for their abundance. The Head requires its residents to eat a “jellybean” daily and hook themselves into its neural network in order to enjoy the benefits it brings, like telepathy and virtual reality surfing, and it strongly discourages voluntary disconnection (since disconnected citizens can engage in wasteful activities like free thought or masturbation). Aiding the city’s prosperity are a species of caterpillar-like creatures of various sizes, which feed on blood and recycle the dead into water and electricity. Oh, and every now and then citizen’s heads will spontaneously explode for unclear reasons (when not caused by cyberattacks on the Head’s infrastructure, it may to have something to do with mental hygiene, or possibly too much masturbation). The populace views random spontaneous decapitation as a small price to pay in exchange for the necessities of existence, though. It seems everyone is allowed to join the city as long as they submit to the Head and eat the jellybean, which may explain the large refugee camp outside the city gate. The plot begins when our hero, outrageously mulletted, Polish-accented detective Djonny, who married to a Japanese woman who can disconnect from the Head by singing, is assigned to investigate a murder at the refugee camp. There, he encounters a group of (mostly female) nomads who keep half their faces shrouded in hajib-like headdresses, refuse to connect to the Head, and have some kind of undefined, scarcely explored mystical powers. Djonny suspects one of the refugees, Rana (a second-billed but only marginally important Noomi Rapace), as the killer, and also suspects her of being a “cyber witch.” The real culprit will eventually be revealed (and will not be much of a surprise), but in the meantime Rana seems to put some sort of curse on Djonny, which, for reasons which are again entirely unexplained, results in him occasionally turning into a tiger.

There’s also an elf-eared assistant who hangs around in the background doing nothing, and a lot of gratuitous trippy stuff. For arbitrary reasons, the movie sports an 80s aesthetic, even beyond the star’s featured curly mullet, track suit, and smoked sunglasses. The soundtrack proudly features “The Final Countdown” and a cover of “Take My Breath Away,” and the rest of Marcin Macuk and Zuzanna Wrońska’s score oozes retro synth-pop. Overall, Hot Spot‘s post-apocalyptic vibe makes it seem like it was created according to Panos Cosmatos‘ “poisoned nostalgia” technique: a teenage boy’s flawed imagining of a story conveyed by a lurid 1981 VHS box cover.

Many complain that Hot Spot leaves genuinely promising sci-fi concepts by the wayside in favor of meaningless psychedelic trip sequences and showy nonsense. It’s a fair rap, and an easy case to make. But it seems like a serious examination of a dystopian AI-driven cyberfuture is not what Hot Spot aims at. This is still likely the most entertaining and unpredictable movie about a telepathic post-apocalyptic detective in a blond mullet slowly turning into a big cat after an encounter with a cyber witch that you will see all year, and that’s enough to justify a watch. It breezed through theaters like a sirocco, but should hit VOD/streaming soon.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If ‘Hot Spot’‘s first fifteen minutes are a delightfully idiosyncratic barrage of sci-fi ideas, spinning ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Dune’ and ‘Logan’s Run’ through the Eurotrash lens of ‘Valerian and Laureline,’ its remaining 90 grind through those ideas until the gears slowly screech to a halt. It’s a shame, too, because Smoczyńska managed such an interesting command of tonal strangeness in ‘The Lure’; as self-consciously weird as it was, you followed the emotional truth of what the characters were going through. Here, any thematic coherence gets a bit 404 error, right alongside its plot beats.”–Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com (festival screening)