Forget everything you know about tidy sci-fi plotting. Hot Spot, the new film from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska, is less a story to follow than a world to fall into — a hallucinatory dystopia stuffed with cyber witches, blood-transfusion worms, retrofuturist ’80s noir outfits, dried-up landscapes, and ancient Greek ruins. Presiding over it all is an omnipotent AI known as “The Head,” which has effectively made humanity dependent on technology just to survive.
At its core sits a detective mystery, but Smoczynska has no interest in moving from point A to B in a straight line. Noomi Rapace — of Prometheus and Constellation fame — plays Rana, a mysterious rebel leader who refuses to connect to the system. This isn’t the usual sci-fi heroine routine, though. The movie is vivid, occasionally grotesque, and cheerfully indifferent to whether you can keep up.
“Hot Spot’s not about following the plot,” Smoczynska told Polygon. “It’s rather to experience this world and to ask the question about this world, and to ask the question about our world here, and also what defines us.”
The DNA of the film traces back to screenwriter Robert Bolesto, Smoczynska’s longtime collaborator behind her wildly imaginative 2015 mermaid horror The Lure. Bolesto originally pitched “a story about a witch in a refugee camp,” a premise that resonated with the director amid Europe’s refugee crisis. The script also folded in anxieties about fake news, deepfakes, and artificial intelligence — years before ChatGPT entered the cultural conversation.
“[Robert] captured the DNA of the now, of our current world,” she says.
Smoczynska describes the result as “very metaphorical” and “very poetic,” a work concerned with AI, climate change, and war, but also with more intimate terrors: “the fear for our beloved ones, for our children.” The trick, she explains, was to “juxtapose this fear with the love and tenderness.”
Her way into the world-building started with a character: Djonny, played by Andrzej Konopka, whose look she calls “very… particular.” She developed the cast through drawings, working with animator Tomek Popakul to sketch Djonny and Rana before the broader visual language took shape.
For the film’s real-but-unsettling backdrop, Smoczynska shot in Greece, including the abandoned Elinikon airport — a site that once housed an actual refugee camp. The country’s ancient weight mattered too. “In Greece, the whole European culture was born,” she notes, while burned forests, barren terrain, and an ancient Greek theater frame a civilization well past its expiration date.
Watching Hot Spot feels closer to staring at a collage painting than settling in for a blockbuster — cohesive but not always coherent. For Smoczynska, that ambiguity is the point. She spent five years chasing not just what happens next, but “how to tell the story in terms of the visual narration.”
“I also am very interested in exploring the language of the cinema,” she says. Coming from most filmmakers, that’s a throwaway line. Coming from one of surrealist cinema’s genuine originals, it lands. Hot Spot is now playing in select U.S. theaters.
