Playing mischievous games with our current existential fears around the dawning age of AI, Polish director Piotr Winiewicz’s debut feature About a Hero is a fascinating experimental hybrid that blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, avant-garde performance piece and audio-visual artwork, absurdist comedy and crime thriller. Adapted from a computer-written screenplay, this is a bold choice of opener for the documentary festival IDFA, given is hybrid genre format. But the Copenhagen-based Winiewicz’s film is atmospheric, ambitious, highly original and great fun, even if its mission statement to highlight the perils of AI technology gets a little lost in its dark-mirror universe of digital deepfakes and dream-logic plot twists.
In an inspired act of skewed cinematic homage, the hallucinatory plot screenplay to About a Hero was generated by training various AI programs on the films, voice, image and interviews of Werner Herzog. Winiewicz chose the legendary German director partly because one of his initial sparks to make this project was a claim by Herzog, back in 2016, that a computer would never make a film as good as his in thousands of years. The film-makers even named their main screenwriting program “Kaspar”, a winking allusion to Herzog’s macabre historical drama The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). With its timely themes and playful tone, this sui generis docufiction oddity will certainly appeal to further festivals and intellectually curious audiences following its world premiere in Amsterdam this week.
Herzog gave his wary blessing to About a Hero and contributes a brief audio clip, although fake versions of him dominate the film, notably a semi-lookalike actor (Willi Schlüter) and an uncannily accurate voice-over that is almost entirely computer-created. “I am an involuntary participant in this film,” this disembodied voice protests at one point, “an increasingly distorted translation of my identity”. But is this the real or the unreal Herzog speaking? This nightmarish uncertainty, tinged with deapdan humour, is all part of the film’s disquieting message. Vicky Krieps and Stephen Fry also have cameo appearances alongside authors, scientists, cultural critics and legal experts discussing the wider implications of AI.
Distilled by human authors from a sprawling AI screenplay, About a Hero actually feels less like a Herzog movie than a David Lynch thriller, a highly stylised murder mystery which unfolds mostly in the dark corners of a fictional German town. Following the unexplained death of a factory worker called Dorem Clery, everyone in the town seems to have their own shadowy explanation, including his widow Eleonore (Imme Becard), crime reporter Beatrice (Krieps), and a local lawman repeatedly billed as a “plice” officer, a wry nod to how AI programs often mangle language. The visually striking use of dimly lit interiors, unsettling sound design, and ghostly voices woven into the audio mix are very Lynchian touches too.
Full of stilted dialogue and a light sprinkling of AI-generated imagery, the film’s scrambled narrative also contains recurring allusions to the Hal 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), an early prophetic warning about machines outsmarting humans, which makes thematic sense. But many other plot detail here makes very little sense at all: an erotic seduction scene involving a woman and a toaster, an interview conducted using only body language, a cross-dressing neighbour, a deep zoom into a jungle tableaux that suddenly comes alive, plus minor characters with bizarre names like The White Haired Lady and The Man In Pain. “I don’t understand where this film is going”, complains the Virtual Herzog at one point, a sentiment that many viewers will share.
Even so, About a Hero just about sustains its compellingly weird mood throughout, held together by impish humour and an engagingly goofy logic of its own. At times it feels like a purely formalist exercise, a deep dive into the digital subconscious, unmoored from human reality. But there are flashes of intellectual clarity behind these ludic games and heavily mannered aesthetic effects. As Stephen Fry notes in his fragmentary interview, “even if we are not destroyed by AI, we will be humiliated by it.”
Director: Piotr Winiewicz
Screenwriters: “Kaspar”, Anna Juul, Piotr Winiewicz
Cast: Imme Beccard, Vicky Krieps, Willi Schlüter, Steffen Böye, Ida Beccard, Bernd Tauber, Claudia Harder, Bianca Rusu, Ramona “Momo” Stueckemann, Thomas Ebert, Christian Preuss, Mathias Max Hermann, Axel Schlimme, Anna von Auersperg, Figen Fener, Michael Fyrst Rasmussen, Genc Jakupi, Michael Davies, Tina Hermes, Robert J. deBrauwere
Stephen Fry, Deborah Bennett, Boris Groys, Charles Mudede
Cinematography: Emil Aagaard
Editing: Michael Aaglund, Julius Krebs Damsbo
Music: Lasse Aagaard
Sound designer: Peter Storm
Production designer: Emilia Bongilaj
Machine learning: Esbern T. Kaspersen
Conceptual technology: Mads Damsbo
Producers: Mads Damsbo, Rikke Tambo Andersen, Sam Pressman
Co-producers: Max Loeb, Sven Junker
Executive producers: Edward R. Pressman, Paula Paizes, Peter Hyldahl, Sven Junker, Alexander Kiehn, Jan Philip Lange, Micha Bojanowski, Trey Terpeluk, Doug Scott, Hicham Oudghiri, Aelfie Oudghiri
Production companies: Tambo Film (Denmark), Pressman Film (US)
World sales: Film Constellation
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In English
85 minutes
