Neptune Frost (2022)
dir. Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman
Rated: N/A
image: ©2022 Kino Lorber
There is a sequence in the first half of Neptune Frost that references the biblical revelations of the prophet Ezekiel. An important character in the three major Abrahamic religions, Ezekiel is given a prophecy from God, who is accompanied in the vision by four cherubim that have “four wheels” that move alongside each creature.
In Neptune Frost, codirectors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman reimagine this holy encounter with a mix of DIY style that manages to add to its ethereal, dream-like quality. The Ezekiel counterpart in the movie has a harness attached to his back with five bicycle wheels that slowly rotate slightly above and behind him as he moves. The addition of blacklight paint to the wheels and the characters in the scene makes the sequence even more mysterious and hypnotic.
Neptune Frost is a pure cinema fever dream. Its power lies in the raw experience of it more than its narrative, although that narrative is powerful in its own right. It tackles everything from colonialism, to patriarchy, to westerners’ obsession with technology and how that obsession translates to oppression for the people who are exploited in order to make our electronic devices a reality.
There is also a sly sense of humor to Williams’s screenplay. At one point in the early going, our protagonist, Neptune, acknowledges in a direct address to the audience how we might be feeling: “Maybe you’re asking yourself, WTF is this? Is it a poet’s idea of a dream?” That’s as good a description as any for what Williams and Uzeyman have created. The poetry of Neptune Frost is dazzling and confounding; it feels like religious prophecy by way of Marxist critique on colonialism and runaway consumerism.
The story begins in a coltan mine in Rwanda. Coltan is the raw material used to make tantalum. The tantalum capacitators made from this material power consumer tech like cell phones, laptops, and cameras. One worker in the mine, Tekno – named so because his father believed in the promise of technology, before he saw the devastation to his people that mining the raw materials for electronic devices would bring – seems to have a revelation about the power of the raw ore that he and his fellow workers are liberating from the ground. He holds up a piece of rock as if to beseech everyone around him to behold its power. After refusing to get back to work, one of the ruthless guards in the mine beats Tekno to death right in front of Tekno’s own brother, Matalusa, who also works in the mine.
In his rage and frustration at the death of his brother and the cruelty of his and his comrades’ working conditions, Matalusa joins a mysterious hacker collective. The group is intent on tearing down the exploitative, oppressive status quo.
Elsewhere, Neptune, an intersex runaway who flees their* village after a predatory clergyman attacks them, discovers the collective. Neptune also finds a special power within themself that the collective needs in order to wake up the world to the inhumanity of techno-fascism.
If that seems like a lot, I should also add that Neptune Frost is a musical within the sublimely inventive and avant-garde movement known as Afrofuturism.
I fully acknowledge that I am woefully underqualified as an expert on the nuances of the genre, and not only because I’m white. My painfully limited experience with Afrofuturism – which uses sci-fi trappings to explore how the African diaspora experience influences science and technology – reaches no further than Beyoncé’s visual album Black is King, selected works from Janelle Monáe, and an understanding that I need to see one of the earliest examples of the genre, 1974’s Space Is the Place, as soon as possible.
The dreamscape that American rapper, singer, songwriter, poet, and actor Saul Williams conjures alongside his codirector, Rwandan actress and playwright Anisia Uzeyman, is nothing short of magical. Through the use of Williams’s unapologetically political songs, the picture’s narrative – which, from my brief description above, reads as much more straightforward than it feels as the movie washes over you – takes shape episodically.
Each stunningly staged sequence bleeds into the next; the film’s aesthetic has the effect of watching a drop of food coloring slowly expand throughout a cup of water as it swirls and mixes with the liquid. Neptune Frost is kaleidoscopic. It pulls off a rare trick of oneiric cinema. Even as you’re fully engaged and swept up by each individual set piece, there are moments when you stop and say to yourself, “Wait, how did we get here from the last sequence?” It’s a mystery that confounds rational explication as you experience it. It’s only later, like the half-remembered bits-and-pieces of a dream, that your logic-minded brain tries to make reason out of symbolism and metaphor.
There is plenty to latch onto even as the world of Neptune Frost engulfs you. The rage that the hacker collective expresses in a song like Think Like They Book Say – an attack on religious-text based homophobia and bigotry – is powerful. One song – sorry to say that I can’t find the title online – lambasts entitled white westerners for the pain and suffering we cause in the name of technological convenience. “They use our blood and sweat to communicate with each other,” sings one. “They don’t see our faces behind their screens,” laments another.
The core of the music for the film comes from Williams’s 2016 solo album, MartyrLoserKing. Matalusa declares himself the MartyrLoserKing of the hacker collective in their efforts to overturn our global techo-fascist power structure by attacking the illusive Authority, the group in charge of the repressive and violent management of the coltan mine, among other crimes against humanity.
The death of Matalusa’s brother transforms into a musical lament for both the fallen comrade and a celebration of the collective power of labor. The rest of the mine workers transform into a percussion section, drumming out a syncopated, surprisingly uplifting – considering the circumstances – rhythm that puts creativity and the human spirit front and center.
The playful set and costume design for Neptune Frost adds to its bonkers aesthetic and Afrofuturist roots. Matalusa wears a coat made out of computer keyboards. The inner sanctum of the hacker collective – it’s a clearing in a wooded area that is protected by some sort of force field that is never fully explained – is an amalgam of old and new technologies retrofitted and embellished so that it looks like it’s coming out of a Mad Max movie. All the characters carry around what look like cell phones, but which are much more advanced and futuristic looking than anything currently on the market.
The most thrilling turn in the movie – both visually and thematically – are the moments when Neptune merges with the internet in order to make the collective known to the larger world. These sequences employ trippy CGI; they add to the sense that the best way to approach this movie is as if it were a dream.
My final bit of advice if you decide to seek out Neptune Frost – especially if you look or sound anything like me – is to open yourself up to the cri de coeur that the movie offers. The central critique, that (relatively) affluent westerners’ obsession with technology is causing great suffering to people in the Global South, is aimed squarely at me and those like me. It was jarring to be so behind the message of a movie while simultaneously realizing – and very early on; though the storytelling techniques are mystical, this movie has zero chill about making its grievances clear – that my country and culture are the problem.
It stings. It’s supposed to. Williams and Uzeyman’s most uplifting message is that we can begin to heal the damage done to both our fellow humans and our home – the movie also makes clear the environmental cost of our techno-lust – by supporting the basic human rights of those who make our modern conveniences possible.
As the movie says, “The miner is everything. The miner is the source of power.” Change the words “the miner” to “labor” and you begin to grasp the wonderful, radical transformation that Neptune Frost and its creators are agitating for.
*It’s never made explicitly clear how Neptune feels about their gender identity, but because the character is described in the synopsis of the film as being intersex – the character is portrayed by two different actors at different points in the movie, Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja – I’m using they/them pronouns.
Why it got 4 stars:
- From its first frame to its last, Neptune Frost is completely entrancing. As I watched it, I got the distinct feeling that I was looking at the future of art cinema.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- One of the funniest moments in the movie is when a character relates an African proverb. I’ll have to paraphrase, because I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was something like “One who swallows a coconut cares little for his anus.”
- I’d have to ask Saul Williams to be sure, but I’d bet money that one particular shot in Neptune Frost is an homage to Spike Lee’s signature move, the double-dolly shot. That’s where a character is placed on the dolly along with the camera (sometimes two different dollies are used) so that both the camera and the characters are moving along the scenery at the same speed. That technique is particularly dream-like on it’s own.
- I noticed one familiar name in the credits. Sound editor Skip Lievsay, who has worked with the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, and the aforementioned Spike Lee, to name only a few, is credited as the Re-Recording Mixer/Sound Mixer. Lievsay has been nominated for multiple Oscars, and he won one in 2014 for his work on Gravity.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- A friend and I saw this at the Texas Theatre. There was a good-sized crowd in attendance for an art film. There were probably a dozen or so of us at the screening.