Mute is a 2018 sci-fi drama about a mute bartender who goes up against his city’s gangsters in an effort to find out what happened to his missing partner.
Duncan Jones‘ latest feels like it’s timed perfectly. Last year’s Blade Runner 2049 reinvigorated interest and introduced many to the original’s highly-influential aesthetic style of storytelling, something that Jones himself confesses as being inspiration for this. Mute is, like much of what Jones has done with his own films, a visual experience, existing in a world that is immediately familiar for those who have seen the Blade Runner films yet is surprisingly hollow in fleshing this out, leaving an ambitious project mostly sidelined.
In a not so distant future, an Amish child named Leo is badly injured in a boating accident, leaving him unable to speak, his parents, bound by their faith, refuse the surgery that could correct it, putting their hopes in their god. A few decades later, the now grown Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) lives in Berlin, working as a bartender in a cyberpunk strip club where the dancers are ghastly bulbous robots. He’s in a relationship with Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh), a bright blue-haired waitress at the club with whom they share a great love, though she clearly is hiding something. Frequenting this bar is an American AWOL surgeon named “Cactus” Bill (Paul Rudd) who along with Duck (Justin Theroux) perform messy surgeries on criminals. There seems to be a connection to Nadirah. When she suddenly disappears, Leo takes to the seedy streets to find her, discovering a dark world that will change him forever.
It’s a little hard to pinpoint just what is off with Mute. It would be easy to start with Leo, a main character who must use his eyes and body to communicate, which leaves the always dynamic Skarsgård somewhat limited. It’s not like this is a new thing. Plenty of mute characters have made their films compelling. However, there is a detachment to Mute that never quite clicks, the manufacturedness of it all somehow pushing it out of the story.
Amusingly, it’s set in the same universe as Jones’ 2009 Moon, a brilliant film that here, sort of has a brief answer to its final question for those who look fast. That was a film about a lone figure in isolation, trying to solve a perplexing mystery, and in many ways, Leo is the same, his muteness isolating him as well as he searches for answers as to what happened to his girlfriend. The difference is that the world of Mute is lifeless, even as the sets brim over with color and all sorts of quirky characters. Jones is committed to the style and takes us on a tour of the hotspots, and sure, much of it is interesting to explore but has no personality because it is so clearly stuck in the trend of neon-soaked Blade Runner-esque cityscapes.
Still, where it mostly loses its grip is the slow pacing and lack of momentum, which never really takes hold as we follow these intersecting stories that eventually collide. Rudd is his typically funny and charismatic self, being the highlight, while Skarsgård has presence, though is extremely dark. It makes it hard to know how to take it all, the shifts in tone only one of a few issues that keep this good to look at but without any spark.
Jones is a terrific filmmaker, a talent who isn’t afraid to take chances, even as his movies remain uneven. This is a film that works hard to establish its atmosphere and there are several good moments that capitalize on just that, however it’s disappointing to be in a world without any energy and try to follow a hero with nothing to say, both literally and figuratively.