Neptune Frost review: a bold, bizarre Afropunk sci-fi musical adventure

This assessment of Neptune Frost initially ran at the side of the movie’s premiere on the 2022 Sundance Worldwide Movie Competition. It has been up to date and republished for the movie’s launch in theaters and digital cinemas.

“Perhaps you’re asking your self, WTF is that this? Is it a poet’s concept of a dream?”

These are the primary phrases spoken by Neptune Frost, the eponymous protagonist of Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams’ Afrofuturist musical, after a life-threatening bike collision, a miraculous revival, and a subsequent transformation. It’s an affordable query, the sort viewers could ask themselves at a number of factors all through the course of the movie’s unusual, circuitous odyssey.

Filmed and set in and round Rwanda and Burundi, and government produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Williams and Uzeyman’s “anti-capitalist cyber-musical” follows the story of itinerant intersex runaway Neptune Frost (portrayed at completely different occasions onscreen by Elvis Ngabo “Bobo” and Cheryl Isheja). Spurred by the lack of their mom, they embark on a journey of self-discovery and re-invention. Dogged by an oppressive police drive recognized solely as “The Authority,” Neptune is inexplicably drawn to a mysterious village cobbled collectively out of discarded e-waste, house to a small hacktivist enclave of revolutionaries and a coltan miner named Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse, a musician who performs as “Kaya Free”), who’s grieving the dying of his youthful brother Tekno. Collectively, the 2 type a bond that manifests as an influence which threatens to upend the parasitic relationship between Western expertise and the World South. Additionally, there are musical numbers!

That’s lots to throw at first-time viewers, not to mention anybody unfamiliar with the truth that Neptune Frost is technically an adaptation of Williams’ 2016 idea album MartyrLoserKing, from which the movie’s rating and soundtrack are closely derived. At occasions befuddling, although adamantly mesmerizing, Neptune Frost fuses searing anti-establishment lyricism with ethereal electronica to create a movie and universe worthy of its place alongside the likes of Solar Ra’s House Is The Place and 2019’s I Snuck off the Slave Ship. The costumes in Neptune Frost, created by multidisciplinary artist Cedric Mizero, are notably putting — they acceptable supplies like discarded circuit boards, free wiring, and even bicycle wheels to create designs that skew between eccentric and otherworldly.

Picture: Sundance Institute

Neptune Frost isn’t particularly involved about explaining itself. As a substitute, it’s adamantly preoccupied with the character of boundaries and find out how to hack them: It considers the delineations of sophistication and capital, gender and intercourse, the highly effective and the exploited, then addresses how these distinctions are fashioned and the way they are often subverted, re-examined, and reimagined by the ability of affection, group, and an consciousness of the worth of 1’s labor within the world provide chain. Neptune Frost probes the query of how we create a future past the pernicious parasitism of capitalism and colonialism. Put one other method: How can one mould a brand new actuality from out of the detritus of a world in smash?

As fascinating as these questions are, none of them could be participating if not for the music which features as Neptune Frost’s major mode of exposition. The high-level ideas of the movie’s premise dovetail completely into the eclectic sonic palette of its Afropunk-inspired soundtrack. The tracks that originated from Williams’ 2016 album MartyrLoserKing have been re-orchestrated and rearranged to evolve to the movie’s context. The lyrics have been rewritten right into a medley of Swahili and English, French and Kirundi, reflecting the worldwide mindset on the coronary heart of the movie’s focus, and a mirrored image of Rwanda’s wealthy, different cultural background. It isn’t the kind of musical the place individuals will really feel compelled to memorize and belt out the lyrics, however they’re prone to discover themselves nodding to the beat.

Neptune Frost is in regards to the connection between pleasure and anger, between celebration and introspection, between a group and the person. Extra pointedly, it’s a film a couple of disenfranchised collective who seize energy of the expertise their very own lives and labor have assembled, and use it to offer voice to a message that had gone unheard. “Know-how was the identify of my brother,” Matalusa tells his fellow hackers within the movie’s ultimate act. “It’s expertise that guides us in the present day. They use our blood and sweat to speak to at least one one other, however have by no means heard our voice. Till now.”

Picture: Sundance Institute

Although Neptune Frost’s message would possibly initially come throughout as scattershot, it rings loud and clear by the movie’s climax, punctuated by an explosive act of state violence that, somewhat than succeeding in its effort to snuff out resistance, solely appears to have additional amplified it. Neptune Frost is a daring, weird, and unflinchingly assured debut that prompts its viewers to interrogate the very actual human prices of the knowledge age by the speculative lens of a future each vastly completely different and uncannily much like our personal.

Neptune Frost opens in New York on June 3, with a city-to-city rollout following. Test the movie’s web site for native listings and upcoming showtimes.