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Most films want their audiences to suspend disbelief. “About a Hero” would prefer they keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution in trusting its visual and auditory components,” runs an onscreen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz‘s irreverent exercise in AI-enabled storytelling — a knowingly contentious opening film for this year’s IDFA documentary festival, not least since many wouldn’t classify it as a documentary at all. Wrapping an imagined (and blithely incoherent) murder mystery around a talking-heads discussion of artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity, this seemingly hybrid exercise offers nothing to assure viewers that any one of its components is more “real” than another. As a feature-length stunt, it has some wit, but falls short on ideas and argument.
Still, the flashy conceptual gimmickry and big-name participation in “About a Hero” ought to be enough to turn distributors’ heads as the film makes its way through the docfest circuit — even if the biggest of those names isn’t really on board. Not in person, anyway. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s statement that “a computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years,” Winiewicz trained an AI model entirely on the venerable filmmaker’s body of work, and has used it both to script a fictional tale of an unexplained death in a German factory town, and to fashion a facsimile of Herzog to narrate it. Named Kaspar (last name Hauser, one presumes), the model is, like much AI creation, close to authentic but eerily askew in all manner of particularities — beginning with its deepfaked mimicry of those distinctively husky Herzog tones, which is scarcely on the level of a party-trick impression.
That’s sort of the point: Hardly an exercise in AI advocacy, “About a Hero” appears to revel in its just-off-ness, posing a challenge to Herzog’s dismissal while proving him right as its narrative — not wholly Kaspar’s creation, but adapted by Winiewicz from the model’s output — goes progressively haywire. As such, the film may function less effectively in isolation than as a literal conversation-starter, either in a festival environment or attached to a post-screening Q&A.
Divided into chapters that follow no logical numerical order, the story centers on an unseen figure: Dorem Clery, an unremarkable employee at a kitchen appliance factory in the fictitious German town of Getunkirchenberg, who is found dead in circumstances that, whether due to foul play or AI storytelling error, never entirely make sense. It emerges that he had been working on an enigmatic project named only “the Machine,” itself a symbol of AI development, and perhaps in some way responsible for his death. The film’s investigations on this front, however, are repeatedly sidetracked by a focus on Clery’s widow Eleonore (Imme Beccard), who channels her grief into interactions with domestic appliances that eventually morph into a most literal form of technolust.
“If, in your head, this is clear, conclusive and watchable, you have lost your mind,” wheezes faux-Herzog as Eleonore gets frisky with a toaster — not the first time that “About a Hero” calls itself out on its intentionally flawed construction, in a running joke that wears a little thin by the film’s close. (It’s better when Winiewicz just lets viewers pick up the glitches themselves, as with repeated 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 — mostly offer thoughtful but noncommittal musings on AI, doing little to sway or shape the film’s gauzy thesis. Eight years ago, Herzog’s documentary “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World” reflected more substantially on humanity’s impending battle with its own digital innovations, though with considerably less metatextual trickery.
“I don’t mind knocking the idea that humans are the be-all and end-all of intelligence,” Mudede says. But “About a Hero” doesn’t really engage with the possibilities of AI as a post-human construct, not least since its own dabblings with the technology are vetted and tempered by the filmmakers, whether in the name of reason, irony or entertainment. The film is almost certainly more watchable for that degree of human involvement — it’s handsomely shot and designed, with a drily amusing supporting performance from Vicky Krieps as a frazzled reporter investigating the Clery case. Yet if it’s a provocation at all, it’s a winking, cautious one, arguably standing in its own way to reassure viewers that life and art as we know them will stand for a while yet, if not necessarily for 4,500 years.