With an influx of film requests for review this summer I have been able to be a bit more choosy with what I decide to check out. Upon beginning Miguel Llansó's Infinite Summer I did wonder what made me go with this Estonian film. It is definitely a strange movie, but as it went on there were certain elements that really did appeal to me.
Shy and awkward Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O'Brock) is at a decisive point in her life, having finished school she now has to decide what she wants to do with herself. During the summer break she has decided to spend it with her best friend Grete (Johanna-Aurelia Rosin) at a lakeside holiday home. Due to Mia's quiet nature she soon finds herself out-shadowed by a Canadian friend of Grete (played by Hannah Gross - Joker). In her solitude she meets up with a guy calling himself Dr. Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies) who she meets on an online dating app. Living nearby, he brings her a strange respirator device he had created that is tailored to deliver the ultimate mediation exercise. Using it, she is startled to see intense hallucinations in the form of a smoke based being. Her friends, seeing its drug like effects decide to also get their own respirators.
Meanwhile, two detectives - Katrin (Katariina Unt) and the eccentric Jack (Steve Vanoni) are found to have been monitoring all this, with the respirator maybe coming from a powerful world reaching secretive organisation who are near impossible to track down.
Infinite Summer had a whole load of different parts to it that made it seem like it was inspired by various films and TV shows. The world had a bit of a Black Mirror vibe to it, seeming to take place in a near future where not only has A.I become a more essential tool (shown to be used heavily both by the police and general places like the local zoo), but everyone communicates using an augmented reality headset rather than phones, even using the augmented reality to work on digital computers rather than physical ones. This respirator feeds into this near future technology, with it shown that cartridges in it are able to deliver the drug.
There was also a 'coming of age' feel to the film with some Garden State vibes. Mia appears lost as a character, and being so silent you never really get a good feel of what is going on in her head. This is sometimes to the detriment of the story as it did feel that occasionally she was a blank slate used to carry the viewer through the plot. There were not a huge amount of likeable characters, with Mia's father (Ivo Uukkivi) being the most decent one. Characters are often weird rather than nice, but this suited the film's comedic tone that it sometimes displayed, such as when Jack asks Katrin if she made the sandwich she hands him, with her then pointing out that they are in a diner so she obviously brought it from there.
The best parts of the movie for me where the many hallucinations characters have. This usually takes the form of smoky tendrils that form hands at their ends, as well as cosmic almost Lovecraftian style sequences where characters under the effect of the drug appear to travel the cosmos. The special effects used here were on the whole great, only a few times they didn't quite appear to gel well against the normal backgrounds. These digital effects are also used on the drug-users eyes to give them a milky quality reminiscent of zombies. I also thought the design of the respirator was great, as was the distorted vocal effect used for the voices of people wearing them.
The story did feel a bit all over the place with the first half focussing on Mia before later parts tried to move the story into a more spiritual path, somehow including slight elements of apocalyptic and possible alien themes.
Infinite Summer was a weird movie, but it did keep me guessing. I think I enjoyed the more thrilling second half more to the first, mainly due to Mia being such an odd character who it was hard to really get behind. I liked the trippy effects, and I liked were the story went, but I feel it could have been shaken up a bit to help with the pacing. Infinite Summer had its World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 27th 2024.
SCORE:
No comments:
Post a Comment