Hot Spot opens with private detective Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) travelling across a barren, dusty wasteland. He sits in his self-driving car, dressed in a white leather uniform, with giant hoop earrings, aviator sunglasses, and a permed mullet. It’s a bold costume choice and a bold statement that sets the tone from the outset. Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska is no stranger to peculiar amalgams of styles and is perhaps best known for the dark and bizarre modern fairy tale musical The Lure. There is a world in which a camp, ’80s-infused, dystopian, cyberpunk mindbender works. It’s just not a world we live in. Here, it falls flat on its face.
Everyone must connect to “the Head”, an all-powerful AI that controls society. Don’t forget to take your “Jellybean” once a day. Otherwise, your head will literally explode. If this happens to someone next to you on the train, you can pull out your oversized maggot-like “biobot” to clean off the blood. The Head is like having ChatGPT in your mind. You can ask it about things, perhaps the weather, and call your family telepathically. It will also broadcast public executions live so you’ll luckily never miss them, wherever you are.
Djonny is brought in for a murder case involving a group of refugees living outside the system, an anti-AI cult who refuse to connect to the Head. They look like they’ve stepped off the set of Dune and got lost. The Lisan al-Gaib is not here. One of the refugees, Noomi Rapace’s Rana, catches his eye with her mysterious and enchanting presence, obscuring whether she is friend or foe. Djonny puts his detective skills into action, inspecting the gruesome scene where one of the refugees has been savagely killed. Rana suggests a potential suspect, whose memory footage, which is conveniently recorded by the Head, saved and accessible (I’m sure there are no privacy or safety issues there), reveals that he did it. Hang on, that’s all it takes?
But the strange occurrences only persist. Heads are inexplicably exploding. There seems to be a “cyberwitch” on the loose who is hacking into the Head, and Djonny is suspicious of Rana. It’s a setup that mildly arouses your curiosity with plenty of dystopian sci-fi thriller potential. Unfortunately, it fully devolves into dull, aimless, nonsensical kitsch.
I was unable to glean anything it had to say beyond its general technological anxieties and anti-AI messaging. There could be something in here about AI’s shortcomings in keeping us safe and questions about what we’re forfeiting as we hand over more control to technology and AI. But its ideas are not expressed in a coherent way, if they are even expressed at all.
The international cast speaks in broken English, lending the film a clunky, uncomfortably uncanny quality that I struggled to look past. The bursts of extreme, grisly violence and aggressively loud sound design are very jarring. It all lacks a careful, assured touch, resulting in a grotesque tonal, structural and conceptual mess.
