Mute Review

Mute (2018) Directed by Duncan Jones

Mute is the latest movie by one-hit wonder Duncan Jones. It tells the story of a mute bartender named Leo (played by Alexander Skarsgard) who is a kind-of Amish person in a neo-noir futuristic Berlin. He has a girlfriend that passively loves him but then goes missing. Oh, and Paul Rudd is a doctor who loves his daughter.

Yes, this review is already sounding dismissive. It does deserve the bad reviews that it got upon its release on Netflix. I understood what Duncan Jones was trying to go for; a stylized noir tale where the protagonist is digging deeper into their lover's real backstory and intentions. As far as the execution of that, Mute falls flat. The first thing that took me out of this experience were the simple title cards. At the beginning of the movie, you see a young Leo in the hospital after his accident. His family denies surgery to fix his voicebox, because yeah Amish people. The camera pans from young Leo on the bed to the doctor's note that just says, "MUTE". It's written in the way that someone in a calligraphy class would write it. From there, there's uninteresting tidbits that took me out of the experience. Sometimes there is downright terrible cgi. Half of the cast plays their parts waaaay over the top with inane dialogue (the girlfriend, Naadirah, has a painfully bad scene with her friend Luba within the first twenty minutes). And the story doesn't give the overall package any reason to have those terrible pieces go overlooked. There is no immersion to this world or these characters that are thrown at us. Mute just ends up feeling like a bad, straight-to-video ripoff of Blade Runner.

Alexander Skarsgard has not had the best track record with movies, and I finished this movie feeling like they wasted his talents. Same for Paul Rudd, who plays Cactus Bill. Cool name, at least. The "twist" with him at the end was bland and not earned. It wasn't even really explained. Mute is not even a good enough movie to turn on in the background while you do other things. Duncan Jones got lucky with Moon.