One of the first things you’ll notice in Agnieszka Smoczyńska‘s genre-hopping sci-fi dystopian thriller-drama-mindfuck “Hot Spot” is that its credits are displayed in several languages: First English, then Japanese, then Polish, all in stylized red typography that evokes the “Metal Hurlant” vibe of the whole affair. Cyberpunk, by its very nature, imagines a multicultural future, albeit one forced together by ecological disaster, or the apocalyptic effects of late-stage capitalism, or the shrinking of distance between tribes as the end of the world forces us to interact. Throw in our current anxieties around AI running our lives, and it’d be easy to root for a treatment on all of this material from the Polish director of 2017’s wild, riveting mermaid musical “The Lure.” But just as cultures clash, so do tones and languages, and Smoczyńska’s film struggles to say anything particularly riveting (or comprehensible) in the bargain.
The scaffolding is classic cyberpunk: “Nowhere in the future,” the opening text crawl reads, the world has collapsed as resources dwindle. One of the only remaining places for solace is a small, intimate compound run by the Head, a sentient AI that demands connection to receive the food and shelter they provide. Most people live comfortably with that arrangement, using the Head to communicate telepathically with each other, play surfing simulations, and look up any bit of information you want. The only price is a “jellybean” you’ve got to eat every 24 hours or (as best I understand it) your head explodes.
The job of keeping the peace falls to a futuristic private detective named Djonny (Polish actor Andrzej Konopka), a paunchy fifty-something enforcer who sports a bleach-blonde permed mullet and giant hoop earrings, strutting confidently to the tune of “The Final Countdown” blaring in his head. It’s an inherently comic image, one you’d imagine Will Ferrell donning in a studio-comedy version of this. Instead, Smoczyńska lets this image speak for itself, an instinct that both helps and hurts us. Djonny is a happy enforcer of the public order and father to his young son Zen (George Aurimas Cris), though his young wife Ayka (Reika Kirishima) resists the pull of the Head.
But a new group of refugees arrives and commits a ritual murder in their first days here. As Djonny investigates, his eye turns to the beguiling and alluring “cyberwitch” Rana (Noomi Rapace), who reveals that the refugees are an anti-tech cult that will refuse the control of the Head. What’s more, Rana begins working her figurative and technological witchcraft on both Djonny and Rana, and things go more than a little higgledy-piggledy from there.
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. Broadly, it’s a tale of a civilization undoing itself thanks to its reliance on technology; more specifically, there’s something in there about the cracks in a broken family. “Hot Spot” is uninterested in connecting those dots with any subtextual punch, preferring instead to shift gears halfway in with a lengthy, mid-film Eurotrash rave (which, to the film’s credit, does perk you up a bit).
Konopka makes for a bizarre lead, his age and decidedly un-leading-man atmosphere only barely baked into the oddity of the film’s world (again, that he plays such a kooky character so straight makes all the quirks that have been stapled onto him befuddling). He’s left adrift to gurn and growl and pout, whether he’s in his skin-tight police uniform or the leather-jacket-and-kilt look he rocks by the climax. (There’s also a bit of a thing where he turns into a tiger, which sorta fits his human visual style but receives zero explanation in the film’s narrative.) He has a partner who says little and sports elf ears, who seems like she’ll be important but ultimately amounts to nothing; we don’t even find out what she is. Rapace and Kirishima, for their part, try to find significance in stillness (particularly the former, her haunting gaze peeking half out from a shrouded hood), but they feel like more visual toys for Smoczyńska to play with.
Prior to its premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, Smoczyńska professed that this was a film delivered in “broken English,” as English was the most viable language with which to secure funding. While it may have helped it snag a distribution deal and a budget far higher than a work of this scale would normally find, it’s also one of “Hot Spot”‘s biggest Achilles Heels. The international cast, made of Polish, Japanese, and Swedish actors, almost uniformly struggle to bring life to Robert Bolesto’s inscrutable dialogue. (The sound mixing doesn’t help matters; it’s frankly hard to make out what most anyone is saying if it’s not subtitled. When characters speak in real life, it’s mumbled through thick accents; their telepathic voiceover adds a noxious reverb that makes it even harder to discern.)
The production design is handsome enough, affecting a kind of 1980s vision of the future, from the hairstyles to the clothes to the souped-up solar K-car that Djonny drives around. The set design is appropriately desolate, though staring at the same four locations (the main action seems to have been filmed in an abandoned airport) can get old after a while. The score, by “The Lure”‘s Zuzanna Wrońska and Marcin Macuk, keeps that synth-pop flavor, though I wish it wasn’t the only element of the sound you could legibly make out.
One would hope, in the absence of legible dialogue, the story, or at least its images, would find thematic purchase. Unfortunately, “Hot Spot” feels content to cycle through its hallucinogenic, albeit stylish, beats with the hazy remembrance of a dream. Dream cinema can work quite well; it’s less gripping when in the heart of a murder mystery, particularly one that no one seems all that keen to solve in an interesting way.
This film was screened as part of our coverage of the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival. Releases August 21st via Focus Features.
