I’m telling you this right now: You may have to check out Neptune Frost a couple of times before you get at least some sense of what’s going on. That’s what I did — and I’m still trying to figure it out. Before I wrote this review, I even called my editor Patrick and convinced him to talk me through it. I thought the movie broke my brain!
This Afrofuturistic sci-fi musical throws a whole lotta things at ya. It’s about (I think) technology, racism, community, revolution, love, the future, the past, LGBTQ rights, police brutality, the sun, the moon, the stars, pink hearts, green clovers, purple horseshoes — all that shit. From what I gather, the plot has something to do with Neptune (Elvis Ngabo), an East African runaway who magically turns into both a woman (Cheryl Isheja) and a walking computer virus. Eventually known as “The Motherboard,” she begins hacking into smartphones all over the world from an interdimensional village filled with fellow hacker outcasts. That’s where she also bonds with Matalusa (Bertrand “Kaya Free” Ninteretse), a coltan miner who recently lost his brother.
If this fusion of cyberpunk and Afropunk sounds more to you like a multimedia project than a narrative film, that’s because — well, that’s what it is. It’s actually part of co-director/writer/spoken-word artist Saul Williams’ MartyrLoserKing collection, which also includes albums (some of the songs appear in Frost) and a graphic novel. With the movie (which was mostly financed by a Kickstarter campaign), Williams — along with co-director/cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman — has created a raging, rhythmic manifesto that’s very shiny and fluorescent. With help from costume designer Cedric Mizero, the pair often makes their characters look like neon nocturnal animals whenever the sun goes down.
The directors go about killing a whole bunch of birds with the one stone they’ve got. They go straight to the Motherland in a mission to take down modern online-obsessed culture (“Fuck Mr. Google!” one character yells during a herky-jerky musical number), reminding the audience that people have just as much power as phones. While they’re there, they also call out violent cops, closeted clergymen and other oppressive, patriarchal thugs who keep society as fucked-up as it is.
Frost is a nutty, hallucinogenic experience — like if David Lynch and Octavia Butler decided to do a Sarafina!-style musical composed by Sun Ra. It buzzes with so much activity, a character even declares that this is so much during one scene. You might get the feeling that Williams was ready for viewers to dismiss all of this as pretentious prattle, the sort of heady, hotep nonsense you’d hear from a dashiki-wearing poet at an open mic. I did let out a loud cackle when Neptune, after her transformation, looks into a camera and, via voice-over, says in her subtitled native tongue, “Maybe you’re asking yourself WTF is this? Is it a poet’s idea of a dream?”
A funky fantasia that’s difficult to decipher but pretty to look at, Neptune Frost joins Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s see-it-on-the-big-screen-or-else Memoria on the growing list of 2022 films that are aurally/visually stimulating and baffling as hell.
