Mute movie review & film summary (2018)

“Mute” opens with an accident. An Amish child is horribly injured, and his parents refuse the surgery that could have saved his ability to speak. Cut forward a few decades to an almost cyberpunk future that looks like a blend of anime inspirations, “Blade Runner,” and the kind of thing Jones likely doodled in a notebook when he was bored in school. The whole aesthetic of “Mute” has a “teen fantasy” vibe to it from the tech gadgets that populate this version of Berlin to the weird sex robots and fetishes occasionally highlighted. This vision of the future is more colorful than Ridley Scott’s but it was clearly built on the template of his landmark film.

In this city of hustlers, we meet Leo Beiler (Alexander Skarsgard), the adult version of the Amish kid from the opening scene. He works at an adult entertainment club with a waitress named Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh), whom Leo is dating. Jones takes his time establishing their relationship as a loving, sweet one—Skarsgard can convey a great deal of affection through only his eyes—but it’s also clear that Naadirah has a secret. Meanwhile, we meet a couple of American surgeons named “Cactus” Bill (Paul Rudd, sporting a soon-to-be legendary mustache) and Duck (Justin Theroux). They perform surgeries for criminal enterprises and Bill sulks his way around Berlin. He too clearly has a secret. Maybe it’s related to Naadirah’s? And then Leo’s girlfriend disappears, and our mute hero does whatever it takes to find her.

Jones seems to embrace the noir roots of “Mute”—there’s a poster for “The Blue Angel” in one of the rooms and “the missing girl” is a classic noir set-up—but his piece doesn’t have nearly the atmosphere it needed to make the genre connection work. The production design is shockingly hollow, without a sense of world-building. It’s almost as if Jones and his team were too hesitant to just lean into their influences and so worked too hard to set their design apart, but that makes for inconsistencies and unengaging visuals. It’s perfectly fine to lean into a classic aesthetic like “Blade Runner”—“Altered Carbon” does so effectively—but don’t go halfway.