Mute

It is not often that I watch something and have completely no idea what is going on. It is even more rare that I watch something, have completely no idea what is going on, and not even care to find out.

Films like “Momento” and “The Tree of Life” also made me question their purpose for a majority of their runtimes, but they told their stories in a way that was so compelling that I never questioned if they actually had a story to tell. “Mute”, a 2018 Netflix original film, often feels like it is searching for the story instead of telling one. It lacks a sense of importance and a clear vision, and it suffers greatly because of it.

It is so vague and shrouded in “mystery” that 40 minutes into it, I still had no idea what the core of the story was about. I literally had to force myself to sit through this, but by some miracle, it has a twist that I audibly voiced my surprise at. But even with the twist (that you have to wait almost an hour and a half to get to), they couldn’t stick some semblance of a smooth landing for the turbulent ride that they created.

“Mute” begins with us meeting our main character Leo (played by Alexander Skarsgård for most of the film but is briefly played as a kid by Levi Eisenblätter) lying face down in a body of water and bleeding profusely from the neck. He’s taken to the hospital where his mother is told that they need to do surgery immediately if he will ever have a chance to talk. But we learn that Leo’s family is Amish and thus against modern medicines and surgeries and tells the doctors that “God will heal Leo.”

We fast forward 30 years to 2035 and Leo, who is mute (get it?), is working as a bartender at a strip club in Berlin run by an immoral Russian named Maksim (Gilbert Owuor) and is dating a waitress at the club named Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh). It is at this same club that we meet Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd), an American former soldier and surgeon, who works for Maksim, desperate to leave Berlin.

It is during Cactus’ scenes where “Mute” also suffers with finding its tone. While we are with Leo and Naadirah, it acts like a dark, dramatic love story complete with poetic German musings. But once Cactus is on screen, often with his pedophilic friend Duck (Justin Theroux), it plays like an upbeat comedy.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, movies are allowed to be more than one thing. But “Mute” fails to find an appropriate balance, which often leads to thinking you’re watching two completely different movies that sometime intersect. We don’t even find out how these two stories are connected until the movie is almost over.

For most of the movie, we watch Leo searching for Naadirah and learning things about the world around him after she fails to tell him a secret about her. While he’s off trying to save the woman he loves, we see Cactus spend his portion of the movie doing whatever he can to get travel documents for him and his daughter Josie (Mia-Sophie and Lea-Marie Bastin) and keeping Duck in line.

I’m not entirely sure why “Mute” is set in 2035 or in Berlin. I assume it is because they want to show how far behind Leo is with technology because of his Amish upbringing. During the film, he has to use a lot of technology that he has never used before to answer his questions. The other characters take note of this and often assume him to be dumb. However, this could have been done in any time period. The year doesn’t change the story nor does it add to it. It is the same in 1992 Sacramento as it is in 2035 Berlin, but the set pieces are nice, so that’s a win, I guess.

There are some decent parts presented here. Paul Rudd seems to be criminally underrated as an actor, and Alexander Skarsgård and Justin Theroux do so well becoming their characters that I often forgot they were acting. The twist that I mentioned before is gripping and slightly heartbreaking. It’s a shame that all of these things were wasted on such an underwhelming film.

“Mute” is not very good, and the big ideas that Duncan Jones (director) and Michael Robert (co-writer) have are never actually realized. The premise sounds good on paper, but when done in this way, it just doesn’t really work. “Mute” wants to be a lot of things, and to its credit, it tries its hardest to be all of them, but by trying to do too much, they sadly don’t get anything right.

I give it 1 out of 5 trash cans.