Movie review: Mute

Happy new year, our loyal readers. We hope you had a fantastic festive season! Hot Bloods Writing Club is back this week, and with a whole new genre to explore – we’ll be kicking off 2021 with sci-fi films!

First up is Mute (2018), dir. Duncan Jones.

Lauren’s verdict:

Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) is a man of strong morals and loyalties. Raised in an Amish community, now working in a gangster-run strip club as a bartender, he falls madly in love with blue-haired beauty, Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) and they start a life together. One morning Leo wakes to find Naadi is gone. Convinced something terrible has happened to her, Leo wades through the life she has kept secret from him, desperate to find the woman he loves.

Leo and Naadi’s story is told in tandem alongside the story of Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and Duck (Justin Theroux) – two AWOL military surgeons working for the mob. Bill is raising his young daughter and waiting on fake papers to help them escape the military police, and Duck is a brilliant doctor who spends his time creating robotic limbs for disabled children. As Leo’s search for Naadi continues we begin to see all four lives intertwine. I will warn you now – this script gets dark – really dark. Which was both unexpected and, honestly, pretty unnerving.

Mute is not the sci-fi film I thought it would be, the science fiction elements only seem to dance around the edges of this script. The main story being the mystery of the missing Naadirah and her connections to the repulsive men that control her. This movie is emotionally weighted, and the script is hard to follow at times, but the acting kept me anchored in. Paul Rudd’s de-evolution from the likable, arrogant Cactus into a dark-eyed sociopath with a grudge, is truly something to marvel at. Completely subverting their usual roles as charming jokesters, Rudd and Theroux will make you visibly recoil. Unfortunately for Skarsgård’s Leo, I found their performances so overpowering that Leo seemed almost bland in comparison.

Overall, Mute left me with questions. It felt like a conversation I was only half privy to. I suspect this film may have fallen victim to several edits, as they don’t establish how Leo transitioned from Amish country boy to bartender in a gangster-run strip club. The side characters seem to only exist for shock value, and the grimy, futuristic Berlin is simply a backdrop wholeheartedly underutilised.

1.5 out of 5 robot strippers 🤖

Jeremy’s verdict:

In terms of genre, Mute feels like it is neither here nor there as a sci-fi film. Bar a few minor plot points, it really could have been set in various contemporary settings with very similar dynamics, plot developments, narratives, and characters, and we would have largely had the same story – just without the neon-soaked Blade Runner-esque aesthetics of future Berlin. For some, a transpose-able story like this will be a positive.

For me, it is disappointing, particularly because I was with Mute until the extremely dark plot turns took place: I was holding out for a different ending. These turns, both narrative and character-wise, felt entirely overwhelming to me. They play into ultra-violent and gendered tropes (both of characters and the narrative) and as a consequence, the resolution of the final act, rather than leaving me satisfied, left me feeling deflated.

Which feels like a shame to me, because up until those points, Mute really had me – and it had the scope to resolve itself in so many other ways. To treat its characters so many other ways. To bring in more sci-fi elements of this world. To lean out of those tropes and into something else entirely. Sometimes we don’t get the stories we want, and that’s part of being in the audience – but we’re allowed to wish we did.

To its credit, there are scenes where Mute is restrained in its displays of violence, in ways other films would not be. At one point, the protagonist Leo engages with some mobsters, and rather than the film showing us a blood-thirsty fight scene, it just cuts away, showing us later that he won the fight. But as the film reaches its closing arcs, what was restrained shifts, becoming gratuitous and far too intense, only contributing to the deflated feeling I had as the credits rolled.

I loved the acting from Paul Rudd and Alexander Skarsgård in particular, who felt like they shone in their respective roles. Given how often Rudd has been typecast, it was wonderful to see him explore his full range. The emotion Skarsgård put forward without speaking had me fully engaged. And I appreciated the comic relief of the very brief Sam Rockwell cameo as his character Sam Bell from Moon.

But ultimately, while the first half of Mute set the film up with so much exciting potential, the second half let it down by resorting to a number of worn, and in some cases, outdated tropes. There are moments of real imagination and beautiful cinematography, but given how much I loved Jones’ Moon and Source Code, I just wish things had been a little different.

2.5 out of 5 robot strippers 🤖