Agata Alexander directs this contemplative collection of science fiction shorts set in the near future.
The threat in “Warning,” an impish collection of morbid sci-fi shorts, is aimed at the audience. For the characters, each living lonely, pitiable lives just seven years into the future, the caution comes too late. Technology has untethered them all from humanity — including each other, as this is the rare intercut narrative where the half-dozen story lines don’t affect each other at all.
Among the many miserables the director Agata Alexander and her co-writers Jason Kaye and Rob Michaelson present, there’s a self-improvement obsessive (Alice Eve) who struggles to obey her “God,” an app that logs her swearing; a rescue worker (Rupert Everett) at a shelter for lost androids who agonizes over euthanizing a robot that tells annoying dad jokes; a broke 17-year-old girl (Garance Marillier) who rents her body to strangers that wear her youth like a mech suit; and a low-level satellite maintenance technician (Thomas Jane) who’s been accidentally cut loose in outer space where he drifts futilely with no delusion that he’s valuable enough to rescue.
Together, these tales feel like the hangover at a wake for mankind. The film’s dusky pastel color palette recalls dying flowers on a grave. Yet, even as the synth score mutters anxiously in the background, Alexander takes a prankish delight in her own doom and gloom (though a passing reference to Covid-28 gets only a bitter chuckle). Her film has the wry detachment of Jane’s adrift astronaut gazing down upon a spiritually broken planet. “What’s the lesson here?” he asks. There’s no answer.
Warning
Rated R for language, sexual assault and overwhelming despair. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
