Neptune Frost review: a bold, bizarre Afropunk musical vision of the future

Polygon’s team reports from the virtual grounds of 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. They will be reporting on the most recent independent films in science-fi and horror.

“Maybe you’re asking yourself, WTF is this? Is it a poet’s idea of a dream?”

These are the first words spoken by Neptune Frost, the eponymous protagonist of Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams’ Afrofuturist musical, after a life-threatening motorbike collision, a miraculous revival, and a subsequent transformation. It’s a reasonable question, the type viewers may ask themselves at several points throughout the course of the film’s strange, circuitous odyssey.

Filmed and set in and around Rwanda and Burundi, Williams and Uzeyman’s “anti-capitalist cyber-musical” follows the story of itinerant intersex runaway Neptune Frost (portrayed at different times onscreen by Elvis Ngabo “Bobo” and Cheryl Isheja). They embark upon a journey to self-discovery, re-invent themselves and are motivated by their loss of mother. Dogged by an oppressive police force known only as “The Authority,” Neptune is inexplicably drawn to a mysterious village cobbled together out of discarded e-waste, home to a small hacktivist enclave of revolutionaries and a coltan miner named Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse, a musician who performs as “Kaya Free”), who’s grieving the death of his younger brother Tekno. They form a powerful bond, which could threaten to end the parasitic relationship of the Global South with Western technology. You can also find musical numbers.

That’s a lot to throw at first-time viewers, let alone anyone unfamiliar with the fact that Neptune Frost is technically an adaptation of Williams’ 2016 concept album MartyrLoserKing, from which the film’s score and soundtrack are heavily derived. Although sometimes confusing, the film is adamantly captivating. Neptune Frost fuses searing anti-establishment lyricism with ethereal electronica to create a film and universe worthy of its place alongside the likes of Sun Ra’s Space is The Place and 2019’s I Snuck on the Slave Ship.Costumes Neptune Frost, created by multidisciplinary artist Cedric Mizero, are particularly striking — they appropriate materials like discarded circuit boards, loose wiring, and even bicycle wheels to create designs that skew between eccentric and otherworldly.

Image: Sundance Institute

Neptune Frost isn’t especially concerned about explaining itself. Instead, it’s adamantly preoccupied with the nature of boundaries and how to hack them: It considers the delineations of class and capital, gender and sex, the powerful and the exploited, then addresses how these distinctions are formed and how they can be subverted, re-examined, and reimagined through the power of love, community, and an awareness of the value of one’s labor in the global supply chain. Neptune FrostThis article explores how to create a new future that transcends colonialism or capitalism’s pernicious parasitism. In other words, how can we create new realities from the wreckage and debris of our world?

Even though these are fascinating questions, they would not be interesting if it weren’t for the music that makes them possible. Neptune Frost’s primary mode of exposition. The high-level concepts of the film’s premise dovetail perfectly into the eclectic sonic palette of its Afropunk-inspired soundtrack. The tracks that originated from Williams’ 2016 album MartyrLoserKing have been re-orchestrated and rearranged to conform to the film’s context. The lyrics have been rewritten into a medley of Swahili and English, French and Kirundi, reflecting the global mindset at the heart of the film’s focus, and a reflection of Rwanda’s rich, varied cultural background. It isn’t the type of musical where people will feel compelled to memorize and belt out the lyrics, but they’re likely to find themselves nodding to the beat.

Neptune FrostIt is about joy and anguish, celebrations and reflections, and between the community and individuals. More pointedly, it’s a movie about a disenfranchised collective who seize power of the technology their own lives and labor have assembled, and use it to give voice to a message that had gone unheard. “Technology was the name of my brother,” Matalusa tells his fellow hackers in the film’s final act. “It’s technology that guides us today. They communicate using our sweat and blood but never hear our voices. Until now.”

Image: Sundance Institute

However Neptune Frost’s message might initially come across as scattershot, it rings loud and clear by the film’s climax, punctuated by an explosive act of state violence that, rather than succeeding in its effort to snuff out resistance, only seems to have further amplified it. Neptune FrostThe debut is bold and bizarre and confident.

You should be watching: Kino Lorber acquired Neptune FrostFor a spring release with no specific date.