Mute (2018)

Director:Duncan Jones
Writers: Michael Robert Johnson, Duncan Jones
DOP: Gary Shaw
Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux

A mute bartender goes up against his city's gangsters in an effort to find out what happened to his missing partner.

Duncan Jones considers this film to be a spiritual sequel to his debut feature 'Moon', which was an excellent watch. It is 30 years from now and has got flying cars, drone-delivered fast food and is set in Blade Runner looking Berlin. It was made for Netflix and has got a cheap TV vibe to it in terms of performances. But some of the set design and non-clean look of the future might be intentional. The population of the city or at least the people he is interacting with comes from various ethnic backgrounds and have very diverse sexual orientations. The film is dedicated as a parenting homage to director's father, David Bowie,and his nanny, both of whom have died quite recently. The Berlin setting and the nature of people he meets might be explained by that.  One of the problems with the film that I found is the way it dedicates its time to various characters. First half of the film is largely centered on the mute character and in second half we tend to spend more time with the villainous characters. That serves to work the twist but the twist is kind of dud. One good thing it does is you can't really brand the villains as traditional villains and it almost manages to make you root for the pedophile character at some points, which is quite some feat. That said, the attitude towards it felt a bit anachronistic for me because I do think we are progressing towards determining biology as the cause for that predilection. It won't ever be accepted like homosexuality but people might come around to understand why it exists and the answer might lie with nature.

It is another one of those recent films which made news for its Rotten Tomatoes score. People make the mistake of wrongly understanding the tomatometer score,which is a very binary one. The one you should be looking at is the average rating of 4/10 which is closer to the audience score of 52%. 13% means only 13% of the critics liked it but not that their average rating is something like 1.3/10. I don't pay much attention to the tomatometer rating these days because passable films can get a very high score there because nobody hates it.

Coming back to the film, it is an interesting watch if you can get through it. Some of the performances are underwhelming and some decent enough. It is not as bad as it is made out to be and I checked it out mainly due to the polarizing reactions that it got.

Rating: 2.25/5