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(Review) HOT SPOT: Welcome to the Future. Take Your Jellybean or Explode

By. Professor Horror

 

 

Before you walk into HOT SPOT, do yourself a favor: leave the logic at the door. This is not a movie built to be solved. Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, the Polish filmmaker behind the unforgettable mermaid musical The Lure and the quieter, stranger Fugue, has never really been in the business of tidy narrative logic, and her latest is no exception. Set in a drought-ravaged future ruled by a sentient AI known as the Head, the film follows detective Jan 623 (known as Djonny) (Andrzej Konopka) as he investigates a ritual murder at a refugee compound, a case that pulls him toward Rana (Noomi Rapace), a rebel "cyber witch" rumored to be capable of knocking the Head's entire network offline. Suspend your disbelief, embrace the dream logic, and let the wild, genre-bending ride take you wherever it wants to go. Don't try to predict where the story is headed, because Smoczyńska isn't particularly interested in getting you there in a straight line. This is a film to feel your way through, not one to map out.

HOT SPOT is set, as the opening text bluntly informs us, "Nowhere in the Future" (a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting for a movie this unconcerned with specifics). What we do know: the world has been ravaged by drought, governments have collapsed, and in their place stands the Head, a sentient AI that has taken over the job of keeping people alive by rationing out water and energy to anyone connected to it. Staying connected isn't optional. You eat your jellybean daily, like clockwork, or your head (no pun intended, or actually, entirely intended) explodes in a burst of gore straight out of Cronenberg's Scanners. You stay logged in around the clock, and the Head is watching everything you do with that connection, from what you wear to how you spend your energy (right down to the more intimate ways a person might waste it, which the film is not shy about flagging). It's a system so total that it robs people of something as basic as being alone with their own thoughts; even solitude has to be logged in. Detective Djonny is the Head's man on the ground, and not everyone kneels to the system he serves. A small population lives disconnected on purpose, mystics and refugees who reject the Head entirely, and the newcomers among them are given a three-day ultimatum: plug in or die. Meanwhile, the Head sustains its water supply through grotesque, slug-like creatures that feed on blood and convert it into something drinkable, one of several details Smoczyńska drops in almost casually and never really circles back to explain.

The promise of technology making life safer becomes considerably less comforting once that technology starts deciding how people should live. BUDDY plays with a similar anxiety, wrapping surveillance and control inside the cheerful aesthetics of children's television and asking what happens when something designed to care for you becomes impossible to escape.

Visually, this is a future imagined the way someone in 1982 might have pictured it: bleach-blonde mullets, hoop earrings, boxy chrome cars, and a synth-driven world that runs, at least once, quite literally on the needle-drop of "The Final Countdown." The technology is unmistakably advanced (self-driving cars, phone calls that function more like telepathic communication beamed straight into your skull) but it's wrapped in a distinctly retro-futurist shell, closer to the "Metal Hurlant" comics of the era than anything sleek or minimalist. And yes, with that mullet and those hoop earrings, Djonny's look does flirt with something a little Tiger King, a happy-warrior swagger that fits a man who, for most of the runtime, believes completely in the system he serves. Djonny sees nothing but benefit in the Head. But the longer he investigates, the more he starts noticing the people around him who don't share that faith, people who fear the Head outright, and he starts to view their refusal to connect not as a valid choice, but as a threat.

That tension is really the beating heart of HOT SPOT, even if the plot around it doesn't always hold together. This is a movie about a cyber entity, not unlike the one at the center of The Circle, or that increasingly familiar feeling of a device in your pocket offering you everything, all of the time, so long as you never stop to ask what you're handing over in return. Where HOT SPOT distinguishes itself is in the setting: it takes that familiar all-seeing, always-connected internet-as-god premise and drops it into a cracked, dried-up, drought-stricken wasteland, somewhere between Blade Runner, Dune, and Mad Max, with a healthy dose of Smoczyńska's own surrealist, fairy-tale sensibility layered on top (and, again, an ill-timed round of "The Final Countdown").

Honestly, it's hard to put HOT SPOT into words, and it's just as hard to put my feelings about it into words. I loved the world-building, loved how genuinely difficult it was to predict what was coming next, and I left the theater still turning it over. It made for a great conversation with a friend afterward, both of us trying to dissect it, piece by piece, and figure out what it was actually trying to say. But even with all that dissecting, certain aspects of the film left me unfulfilled. I'm not alone there because a fair amount of the critical conversation around HOT SPOT lands in a similar place...admiring the swing while questioning where it ultimately lands. The back half introduces new ideas (including a late shape-shifting reveal) that never quite tie back into the world the film spent its first act so carefully building. Honestly, it's a movie that's easier to admire in pieces than to defend as a whole.

Where a lot of audiences have landed, and it's hard to argue otherwise, is that Smoczyńska's heart-first, logic-second instincts serve a mermaid musical beautifully and serve a detective mystery a lot less gracefully; once the murder investigation is resolved, the film loses its narrative footing. But even at its messiest, HOT SPOT never stops being genuinely strange to look at, and that alone makes it worth the trip. Just don't go in expecting the Head to explain itself. It won't, and honestly, that's kind of the point.

For another new sci-fi film suspicious of the systems people are asked to trust, DISCLOSURE DAY takes its paranoia in a very different direction, turning first contact into a crisis over information, technology, and who gets to decide what the public is allowed to know.

HOT SPOT connects to theaters via Focus Features on August 21, 2026