Written by: Duncan Jones, Michael Robert Johnson
Starring: Alexander Skarsgard, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux
IMDb Link
This whole film is emotionally confused, seemingly never quite sure of how it wants to make me feel, and in the end it just makes me feel glad that the movie's over.
Mute follows a mute Amish man named Leo, living in Berlin in the near future as he searches for his missing girlfriend. It also follows a pair of surgeons, Cactus Bill and Duck, one working for the mob, the other with kids, for over an hour before explaining their relevance to the first story thread. The film just lurches almost pointlessly from one bizarre scene to the next as it transitions between two at first seemingly unrelated stories, Mute just carries on and on through a faux-cyberpunk world until it attempts a massive twist to tie the two stories together.
The film is almost experimental in its absurdity, attempting to use scenes of Leo's investigation as world-building stepping stones, but saying seemingly very little as it does so. It doesn't really make a difference to the plot that a character Oswald likes to dress up in Kabuki garb and has a pair of sex robots, and it's not like good hard sci-fi where it uses this aspect of the scene to suggest something meaningful, it's just completely strange and before being unintentionally hilarious. The closest the film gets to having a theme about this sort of thing is the degeneration of man's morality through the proliferation of technology, but this is barely touched on before being shoved aside in favour of more aberrant developments, such as the fact that the paediatrician is also a paedophile, a factor that also adds almost nothing to the movie other than almost leading to a chilling conclusion but ultimately losing its bite when the film continues on for twenty minutes more than it should have and taking back its darkest ending to instead offer one that requires a complete change of what little established character there was.
The leads don't make this much easier. Paul Rudd offers a somewhat interesting take as the unhinged and ultra-violent Cactus Bill, but everyone else in the film leaves little to no impact. Skarsgard is almost good, communicating a surprising amount with just his eyes, but the movie does so little to actually frame around his eyes and body language it's a wonder they bothered to make it a factor for his character at all. As a main character, he just gets so little to actually work with.
The Short Version: Mute is a series of half-realised ideas that don't fit together told through a derivative cyber-punk noir motif and structure.
Rating: 3.5/10
Published February 26th, 2018
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