‘About A Hero’: IDFA Review

Dir: Piotr Winiewicz. Denmark/Germany/US. 2024. 84mins

“A pc won’t make a movie nearly as good as mine in 4,500 years.” This quote from Werner Herzog opens a movie which, a second caption quickly informs us, is partially the creation of an AI mannequin educated on Herzog’s physique of labor. As Herzog’s rash boast is challenged by this huge language mannequin, named Kaspar, one would possibly count on a movie model of that well-known chess match between champion Garry Kasparov and laptop Deep Blue. However Piotr Winiewicz’s hybrid documentary, which opens Amsterdam’s IDFA, doesn’t go that approach. A homicide thriller shoehorned awkwardly right into a speaking heads documentary, with a aspect of conceptual cyber smoke and mirrors, it meanders each which approach  – generally playfully, generally intriguingly – in the direction of no explicit conclusion. 

A homicide thriller shoehorned awkwardly right into a speaking heads documentary

The excessive idea premise will definitely generate some warmth amongst devoted cinephiles, however A few Hero’s lack of path is more likely to restrict its theatrical prospects. It’s an ungainly truth, too, that the function debut of Copenhagen-based Polish director Winiewicz is enriched by the information of an extended and sophisticated manufacturing course of that started again in 2018 with enter from a machine studying engineer. Curated Q&A screenings might be one of the simplest ways to supply this context.

The movie’s greatest moments are exactly these Herzog parodies that Winiewicz appears to have felt have been too frivolous, too This Is Spinal Faucet, to underpin a full-length function. Because the digicam flies over the fictional German city the place its core true-crime-style story is about, Herzog’s disdainful voiceover describes it, in gloriously Werner-esque style, as “a spot of undetailed whereabouts and international insignificance”. Later, on arrival within the kitchen equipment manufacturing unit the place deceased worker Dorem Clery had been engaged on a sinister undertaking identified solely as ‘The Machine’, the identical doom-laden voice intones “I may sense the peculiar combination of distress and thriller”. 

But a kind of opening captions has already warned us to ’train warning in trusting the movie’s visible and auditory elements’. Is that this actually Herzog’s voice? An answering machine message we hear early on appears to point that the German director has given his blessing to Winiewicz’s undertaking whereas suggesting, with a curt ‘good luck!’, that he desires nothing extra to do with it. Extra trenchantly, the voice is sweet however not 100% Werner, whereas the narrator determine we see virtually at all times in longshot or from behind is rarely actually a convincing stand-in.

We’re in F For Faux territory right here – although, in right now’s world, it’s extra like D for Deepfake. With its Twin Peaks flavour, the Dorem Clery skein of the story follows the useless employee’s lonely, grief-stunned widow Eleonore (Imme Beccard) as she contends with home home equipment that appear to wish to discuss to her – and within the case of a toaster, go loads additional. Vicky Krieps places in a short however dedicated efficiency within the undeveloped position of an area reporter who has been investigating the Hirschorn manufacturing unit, the place the web of issues appears to have been evolving into the web of thoughts management. In any other case, the neighbours and colleagues of Dorem interviewed by Deepfake Herzog really feel pretend themselves.

Different interviewees float in from the ‘actual’ world, no matter that’s: folks like digital rights lawyer Robert J. deBrauwere, a kind of who appears to know the post-modern irony of a movie which exhibits him critiquing the very launch type that, we assume, he should have signed so as to seem right here. British comic and social media star Stephen Fry is interviewed in the direction of the top in a bucolic setting, opining that “even when we’re not destroyed by AI, we can be humiliated by it”, because the digicam drifts away distractedly to deal with two small CGI birds. These interviews may simply have blown in from Herzog’s personal AI-themed documentary Lo And Behold, Reveries of the Related World.

With its gray townscapes, empty factories and gelid modernist interiors, About A Hero paints an image of a world that appears already to be making ready for the departure of the human race, its twilight temper underscored by composer Lasse Aagaard’s melancholic soundtrack. That, at the very least, is when the movie has its severe face on – one it retains undermining. Round midway in, a personality with a deformed face, who appears to have been enrolled simply to ship this line to digicam, says “You’re in all probability questioning why you’re watching this”. Later, the director himself wonders aloud the place the movie goes. You possibly can solely get away with so many double-bluff quips like this earlier than the viewers suspects you is perhaps severe.