Neptune Frost

Directed by Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman

Running time: 1hr50 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Neptune Frost by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman

Neptune Frost is a poetic odyssey, a genderqueer collection of musical visions and vibrations. To watch it is to both kick back and switch on at the same time: let go of narrative convention, while hanging on tight to a sense of righteous fury, vibrating at a higher pitch than any number of strait-laced documentaries covering the same subject.

This is a many-hued synaesthesiac movie, reimagining landscapes such as an open-pit mine as a lilac-grey expanse punctuated by flashes of orange-red overalls, a chorus-line of workers digging minerals from the bare rock, their picks and spades hammering out a furious symphony of unjust labour performed by Black people, punctuated by the repeated refrain: “these motherfuckers don’t want to back down”.

Despite what must have been a relatively modest production budget, the film has imagination and ambition to burn, and it is gloriously unconcerned with holding the audience’s hand. It’s a film that feels conscious of being part of an Afrofuturist tradition, without being starry-eyed or sentimental about what has come before. It’s not about trying to get to the top of the economic ladder, but about dismantling the ladder entirely.

Rather than invoking the name of a figure like Martin Luther King Jr, the verbal touchstone is spiky sound-a-like Martyr Loser King, which is the title of writer and co-director Saul Williams’ 2016 album. The film is an extension of this record, giving birth to a visual language embodying Williams’ exhortations to “hack into the cultural development of taste”, “hack into masculinity, femininity, sexuality”, “hack into land rights and ownership.”

Though Neptune Frost is careful to call out all art (including, by implication, itself) with the observation that “to imagine hell is a privilege”, it is a relatively low-budget film, and therefore avoids that awkward disconnect you sometimes get when Hollywood vanity projects unveil themselves at a glittering red carpet premiere while simultaneously pulling sad faces about child soldiers/poverty/climate change.

This is not utopian future-gazing. But it’s not all dour, either — lightning flashes of humour root us to the ground. At one point, a man dryly states, “One who swallows a whole coconut trusts his anus.” Although in Neptune Frost, there’s always a meaning behind the meaning — this is a quote supposedly also attributed to Robert Mugabe.

NEPTUNE FROST (2021) Written by Saul Williams | Shot by Anisia Uzeyman | Edited by Anisha Acharya

Selected for Directors’ Fortnight at the 74th Cannes Film Festival