‘About A Hero’: IDFA Review

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

“A pc won’t make a movie pretty much 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 skilled on Herzog’s physique of labor. As Herzog’s rash boast is challenged by this huge language mannequin, named Kaspar, one may 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 means. A homicide thriller shoehorned awkwardly right into a speaking heads documentary, with a facet of conceptual cyber smoke and mirrors, it meanders each which means  – typically playfully, typically intriguingly – in 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 a clumsy truth, too, that the function debut of Copenhagen-based Polish director Winiewicz is enriched by the information of an extended and complicated manufacturing course of that started again in 2018 with enter from a machine studying engineer. Curated Q&A screenings may very well 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 had 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 ready, Herzog’s disdainful voiceover describes it, in gloriously Werner-esque style, as “a spot of undetailed whereabouts and world insignificance”. Later, on arrival within the kitchen equipment manufacturing unit the place deceased worker Dorem Clery had been engaged on a sinister mission identified solely as ‘The Machine’, the identical doom-laden voice intones “I might sense the peculiar combination of distress and thriller”. 

But a type of opening captions has already warned us to ’train warning in trusting the movie’s visible and auditory parts’. 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 mission whereas suggesting, with a curt ‘good luck!’, that he needs 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 isn’t actually a convincing stand-in.

We’re in F For Faux territory right here – although, in at this time’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 speak to her – and within the case of a toaster, go rather a lot additional. Vicky Krieps places in a quick however dedicated efficiency within the undeveloped position of a neighborhood 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 faux themselves.

Different interviewees float in from the ‘actual’ world, no matter that’s: folks like digital rights lawyer Robert J. deBrauwere, a type of who appears to grasp the post-modern irony of a movie which reveals him critiquing the very launch kind that, we assume, he will need to have signed with a view to seem right here. British comic and social media star Stephen Fry is interviewed in direction of the top in a bucolic setting, opining that “even when we’re not destroyed by AI, we shall be humiliated by it”, because the digicam drifts away distractedly to concentrate on two small CGI birds. These interviews might 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 getting ready for the departure of the human race, its twilight temper underscored by composer Lasse Aagaard’s melancholic soundtrack. That, no less than, is when the movie has its critical 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 most likely 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 may be critical.