Most films want their audience to suspend disbelief. “About the Hero” prefers to keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution when trusting its visual and audio components,” reads an on-screen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish director Piotr Viniewicz’s irreverent exercise in AI-powered storytelling — a deliberately controversial opening film to this year’s IDFA Documentary Festival, Not least because many wouldn’t classify it as a documentary at all. An imaginative (and delightfully incoherent) murder mystery wraps itself around a rich discussion of artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity, and this seemingly hybrid exercise offers nothing to reassure viewers that any one of its components is more “real” than the other. As a long ruse, it has some wit, but lacks ideas and arguments.
Still, the flashy conceptual tricks and involvement of “About a Hero”‘s big names should be enough to attract distributors’ attention as the film makes its way through the documentary festival circuit — even if those biggest names aren’t actually there. . Not in person, anyway. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s statement that “a computer won’t make a movie as good as mine in 4,500 years,” Viniejewicz trained an AI model entirely on the esteemed director’s works, and used it to write a fictional take on an unexplained story. Dying in a German factory town, and making a replica of Herzog to tell it. The model is called Kaspar (last name Hauser, one assumes), and it, like so many AI creations, is close to authenticity but frighteningly skewed in all sorts of details — starting with its deep fake imitation of those signature husky tones of Herzog, which are rarely on point. Level of party trick impression.
That’s the point: “Of a Hero” is not an exercise in apologizing for AI, and it seems to relish its even-handed nature, posing a challenge to Herzog’s dismissal while proving himself right in its narrative — not entirely Kaspar’s creation, but modified. By Winiewicz From the model output – it gets progressively more chaotic. As such, the film may work less effectively in isolation than as a literal conversation starter, either in a festival setting or linked to a post-screening Q&A.
Divided into chapters that follow no logical numerical order, the story focuses on an unseen character: Dorm Cleary, an ordinary employee at a kitchenware factory in the fictitious German town of Getonkirchenburg, who is found dead under circumstances, be it due to a crime. Or a mistake in AI storytelling that makes no sense at all. It turns out that he was working on a mysterious project called only “The Machine”, which is itself a symbol of the development of artificial intelligence, and may have been in some way responsible for his death. However, the film’s investigations on this front repeatedly go awry by focusing on Cleary’s widow Eleonore (Amy Pickard), who turns her grief into interactions with household appliances that eventually morph into a literal form of technology.
“If this is clear and conclusive and watchable in your head, you’re out of your mind,” Herzog grumbles as Eleonore fusses over the toaster — and this isn’t the first time “About a Hero” has deliberately called itself out. A flawed construction, in a running joke that weakens a bit as the film ends. (Winowitz would do well to let viewers spot the errors themselves, as with the frequent misspellings of the word “police” in the film’s procedural portions.) On the documentary side of the equation, the film’s interviewees—including Stephen Fry and cultural critic Charles Mudede—offer mostly thoughtful but noncommittal reflections on artificial intelligence, and do little to influence or shape the film’s vague thesis. Eight years ago, Herzog’s documentary Dreams of a Connected World more substantively reflected humanity’s looming battle with its digital creations, albeit with less textual trickery.
“I don’t mind rejecting the idea that humans are the be-all and end-all of intelligence,” Modidi says. But About a Hero doesn’t really engage with the potential of artificial intelligence as a post-human construct, not least because its experiments with the technology are scrutinized and watered down by filmmakers, whether in the name of reason, satire, or entertainment. . The film is almost certainly more watchable for this degree of human involvement – it is wonderfully shot and choreographed, with a hugely entertaining supporting performance from Vicky Cripps as a jaded reporter investigating the Cleary case. However, if this is a provocation at all, it is a wink and a caution, arguably standing in its own way to reassure viewers that life and art as we know them will endure for some time, if not necessarily 4,500 years.