‘Hot Spot’ Review: Agnieszka Smoczynka’s Peculiar Sci-Fi Vision

In “Hot Spot,” the future of law enforcement looks somewhat different from what “RoboCop” predicted in 1987. With his bleach-blond, frizzy-permed mullet, giant hoop earrings, cuban-heeled Beatle boots and black-and-white lycra biker suit fitted to accentuate his every dadbod curve, police detective Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) instead appears to have been teleported directly from 1987 to the barren post-apocalyptic wasteland where Agnieszka Smoczynska’s bizarre sci-fi thriller unfolds. Comfortingly human in its bad taste, Djonny’s demented styling promises some degree of comedy to follow; instead, his sore-thumb appearance in this escalatingly bleak, inscrutable vision of humanity’s last gasp under AI rule is just one of several eccentric tonal conflicts presented to the audience.

The flamboyant strangeness of “Hot Spot” comes as no great surprise: Smoczynska, after all, is the wildly talented genre magpie who first turned heads with 2015’s loopy adult mermaid tale “The Lure”;  since then, the Polish director has brought a similarly singular, dreamy sensibility to more ostensibly straightforward dramatic material, both in 2018’s superb psychodrama “Fugue” and 2022’s flawed but moving biopic “The Silent Twins.” Reunited with “The Lure” writer Robert Bolesto, she returns here to outright fantasy territory, with her biggest budget to date; that, combined with a relatively high-profile U.S. release through Focus Features (following premieres at Fantasia and Poland’s New Horizons fest), might suggest Smoczynska has gone commercial on us.

Only a few minutes into “Hot Spot,” it’s clear that’s not the case. Introductory title cards establish the setting as “nowhere in the future” — though some Greek ruins disrupt the bleached desert sprawl — and the premise is equally unconcerned with finer details. Global climate catastrophe and international governmental collapse have laid waste to much of the world’s human population; those who remain mostly reside on an arid compound where survival is dependent on mandatory connection to the Head, a sentient AI system. The Head provides water and nourishment, and enables residents to communicate telepathically with each other. It also forces residents to witness the grisly execution of anyone who doesn’t follow the rules. If you suspect now that ChatGPT is not your friend, consider your fears founded.

Notwithstanding his unconventional appearance, Djonny is a compliant sort. As a cop, however, his livelihood is dependent on those who aren’t. They include various bands of rebel refugees who have resisted signing their minds over to the Head, but also Djonny’s wife Ayka (Reika Kirishima), an avant-garde musician who, wary of their digital overlords, frequently disconnects from the system — and, to her husband’s consternation, makes their young son Zen (George Aurimas Cris) follow suit. When a ritual murder is committed in this closed community, suspicion falls on the refugees, and Djonny is assigned to the case: His somewhat slack investigations center on Rana (Noomi Rapace), a rebel “cyberwitch” capable of causing sustained blackouts in the Head.

If this all makes approximate sense so far — so long as you don’t ask too many probing questions about who was murdered, why, who Djonny actually reports to, why, and so on — the film’s rather rudimentary logic begins to unravel around the halfway mark. As the primary story stalls, Bolesto’s script gets distracted with secondary narrative elements that are incompatible with the whole. One character, it turns out, has shape-shifting capabilities: This curveball makes for some startling imagery, but doesn’t emerge from any particular circumstance of this dystopian scenario, and doesn’t illuminate anything about it either.

It’s just as well, then, that Smoczynska’s frequently dazzling world-building rests more on atmosphere and design than sociopolitical specifics. When the film throws up an extended, strobe-lit dance-break sequence at one of Ayka’s techno-punk concerts — Marcin Macuk and Zuzanna Wrońsk, the duo behind “The Lure’s” compellingly weird song score, compose her abrasive robo-poetry originals — “Hot Spot” actually feels most in its element, coasting on menacing, sexily dehumanized vibes, amped up by the blood-and-sand hues of DP Jakub Kijowski’s handsomely dehydrated lensing. Anna Anosowicz’s highly resourceful production design makes excellent use of existing midcentury brutalist architecture and far more ancient, enduring structures, all moldering under superficially futuristic window-dressing. “Hot Spot” conjures not a brave new world but a thriftily recycled one, hanging by a thread onto past manmade glories.

Perhaps that also explains Djonny’s increasingly deranged Goodwill wardrobe: faux-tigerskin car coat, knockoff Vivienne Westwood kilt and all. Costume designer Katarzyna Lewinska appears to be having the most fun of anyone in “Hot Spot,” but this spirit of goofy anarchy feels beamed in from another universe, or at least another movie, entirely. When Djonny exits his dusty, self-driving ’80s sports car to the synthy stabs of Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” we sense some winking irony afoot, but that, too, is a tonal red herring. Played completely deadpan by Konopka, the character beneath this daft assemblage of aesthetic choices makes no real sense as a functionary in this dry, dark future, much less as its hero.

That position, by rights, should go to Rapace, characteristically stern and fabulously bescarved as his AI-opposed nemesis, but Rana remains equally an equally unfocused figure. As both their arcs flatline in the deadening desert heat, one could, at a push, argue for “Hot Spot” as a nihilistic forecast of a future in which artificial intelligence renders void all human conflict and contrast. If so, Smoczynska’s restless, vigorously witty imagination feels proudly unsuited to that vision.