Mute, Jones’ first film since his 2016 videogame adaptation, Warcraft, takes in touches of Blade Runner‘s noir thriller atmosphere and Moon’s quirky characters and poignant otherness. The result, however, is a genre piece that doesn’t hang together as well as either of those films. Alexander Skarsgard stars as Leo, a 30-something bartender working in a near-future Berlin. Among a high-tech cultural melting pot, Leo stands apart from everyone else: a childhood accident robbed him of the ability to speak, and his Amish upbringing means that he avoids the use of electronic gadgets wherever possible. Amid a bitterly cold city of neon and crime, Leo’s one flicker of warmth comes from his relationship with Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh), a blue-haired, secretive waitress. When Naadirah disappears, Leo’s forced to engage with the city’s criminal underbelly of brothel owners, sex workers and underground surgeons. Leo’s story alone could form the basis of a hardboiled detective thriller, but the script, written by Jones and Michael Robert Johnson, spends roughly equal time with two of those underground surgeons, the volatile Cactus (Paul Rudd, with a sleazy moustache) and Duck (Justin Theroux, in glasses and a blonde wig). Cactus has plans to use his criminal connections to whisk he and his daughter out of the city; Duck is content to remain behind and indulge his increasingly stomach-churning appetite for young girls. On a low budget – at least compared to something like Blade Runner 2049 – Jones creates a convincingly grim future Berlin. Its flashing signs, floating cars and outlandish makeup all cohere nicely, though there’s little here we haven’t seen in numerous other dystopian glimpses of the future – Mute‘s release on Netflix is unfortunate, given its proximity to the similarly noirish Altered Carbon. What’s never really established is why Mute even needs to be a sci-fi movie; aside from a few gadgets and vehicles, it could just have easily been set in some crime-ridden city of the present. Thematically, meanwhile, Mute could have been as moving and thought-provoking as Moon. Parenthood comes up consistently in Mute: how a mother and father’s religion can have a life-changing impact on their child’s; how vulnerable children are to the morally murky adult world that surrounds them. But Mute’s two-strand approach to its story only serves to diminish its pace and clarity, and Leo’s detective story often threatens to vanish entirely as Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux’s characters bicker and scheme their way around Berlin’s grubbier districts. Skarsgard’s expressive and haunted-looking as the moist-eyed Leo, a character who’s more into drawing and swimming than beating up bad guys, though he’s so tall and imposing that it’s difficult to figure out why Berlin’s assorted low-lifes – including Noel Clarke as a misogynistic nightclub denizen – treat him with such contempt. All the same, he’s a sympathetic character, and it’s a pity the plot doesn’t give him much to do beyond move gloomily from place to place; it’s hard to escape the feeling, particularly by the third act, that Leo isn’t so much driving the plot as shuffling along one step behind it. After the humanistic, deeply moving Moon and the taut thrills of Jones’ second film, Source Code, Mute comes as something of a surprise. Not just because of the grotesque proclivities of its characters, but also because its pacing feels so slack. Nevertheless, Jones is a talented director, and there are moments when the brilliance of Moon shines through: the opening shot has an eerie, dreamlike quality; his more intimate moments with Leo showcase his ability to impart a sense of character with lighting and cinematography rather than words. Clint Mansell’s low-key, murmuring score also matches the story’s increasingly dour mood. Taken on its own terms, though, Mute is something of a disappointment: a slow, muddy mystery that never quite clicks into gear; a sci-fi film that struggles to find its way amid its stifling future city.
title: “Mute Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-22” author: “Samuel Nash”
Mute is an especially personal project for director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code, Warcraft), who has been attempting to get it made for 15 years and finally found a home for it at — you guessed it — Netflix. It’s easy to see why a major Hollywood studio might be averse to the film: it’s aimed squarely at adults, with a twisting storyline set in the shadowy underbelly of a future European society that’s one part Blade Runner, one part A Clockwork Orange and one part Eastern Promises — not an easy sell to the teens and twentysomethings. It’s set in a world that’s a recognizable extrapolation from our own, its denizens even more connected and distracted online while its gleaming ebony towers loom high over winding covered alleys where all sorts of sordid deals are going down. There’s also a jauntiness and irreverence to the two men that clashes with the actions they take and creates a weird tonal dichotomy in the movie, much as the initial scenes of Leo and Naadirah’s romance set a pace that’s not quite glacial but slow enough to get Mute off on the wrong foot. Yet oddly we don’t spend quite enough time with them as a couple to grasp the fervor with which Leo sets out to find Naadirah after she exits. There are other aspects of Leo’s character — he’s from an Amish background, which puts him at cross purposes with the aggressively high-tech city in which he finds himself — that are not developed as forcefully as they could be, along with more spoilerish narrative connections that don’t quite hit as hard as they should, leaving Mute an intriguing but frustrating experience. Skarsgard and Rudd are both very good, even if they aren’t given all the tools they need to make the characters really crackle, and Rudd exhibits — like all the best comic actors — a shockingly dark side to his usual amiable screen personality. Skarsgard has the eyes and physical presence to sell both Leo’s anger and vulnerability. Theroux’s character is more problematic in several ways, with his hidden motivations seemingly designed to be especially unsettling without being intrinsic to the story at hand. It’s one of the many side paths that Mute takes without necessarily linking back to the main narrative. Still, points must go to the director for ambition, intelligence, and for not pulling his punches, even if the movie trudges rather aimlessly toward its conclusion and doesn’t land the emotional moments that Jones clearly wants to deliver. One gets the sense that Jones has a lot he wants to say, but his film, like his protagonist, never quite finds its voice. Mute is now streaming on Netflix.
