‘About A Hero’: IDFA Review

Dir: Piotr Winiewicz. Denmark/Germany/US. 2024. 84mins

“A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years.” This quote from Werner Herzog opens a film which, a second caption soon informs us, is partially the creation of an AI model trained on Herzog’s body of work. As Herzog’s rash boast is challenged by this large language model, named Kaspar, one might expect a film version of that famous chess match between champion Garry Kasparov and computer Deep Blue. But Piotr Winiewicz’s hybrid documentary, which opens Amsterdam’s IDFA, does not go that way. A murder mystery shoehorned awkwardly into a talking heads documentary, with a side of conceptual cyber smoke and mirrors, it meanders every which way  – sometimes playfully, sometimes intriguingly – towards no particular conclusion. 

A murder mystery shoehorned awkwardly into a talking heads documentary

The high concept premise will certainly generate some heat among dedicated cinephiles, but About a Hero’s lack of direction is likely to limit its theatrical prospects. It’s an awkward fact, too, that the feature debut of Copenhagen-based Polish director Winiewicz is enriched by the knowledge of a long and complex production process that began back in 2018 with input from a machine learning engineer. Curated Q&A screenings could be the best way to provide this context.

The film’s best moments are precisely those Herzog parodies that Winiewicz seems to have felt were too frivolous, too This Is Spinal Tap, to underpin a full-length feature. As the camera flies over the fictitious German town where its core true-crime-style story is set, Herzog’s disdainful voiceover describes it, in gloriously Werner-esque fashion, as “a place of undetailed whereabouts and global insignificance”. Later, on arrival in the kitchen appliance factory where deceased employee Dorem Clery had been working on a sinister project known only as ‘The Machine’, the same doom-laden voice intones “I could sense the peculiar mixture of misery and mystery”. 

Yet one of those opening captions has already warned us to ’exercise caution in trusting the film’s visual and auditory components’. Is this really Herzog’s voice? An answering machine message we hear early on seems to indicate that the German director has given his blessing to Winiewicz’s project while suggesting, with a curt ‘good luck!’, that he wants nothing more to do with it. More trenchantly, the voice is good but not 100% Werner, while the narrator figure we see almost always in longshot or from behind is never really a convincing stand-in.

We’re in F For Fake territory here – though, in today’s world, it’s more like D for Deepfake. With its Twin Peaks flavour, the Dorem Clery skein of the story follows the dead worker’s lonely, grief-stunned widow Eleonore (Imme Beccard) as she contends with domestic appliances that seem to want to talk to her – and in the case of a toaster, go a lot further. Vicky Krieps puts in a brief but committed performance in the undeveloped role of a local reporter who has been investigating the Hirschorn factory, where the internet of things seems to have been evolving into the internet of mind control. Otherwise, the neighbours and colleagues of Dorem interviewed by Deepfake Herzog feel fake themselves.

Other interviewees float in from the ‘real’ world, whatever that is: people like digital rights lawyer Robert J. deBrauwere, one of those who seems to understand the post-modern irony of a film which shows him critiquing the very release form that, we assume, he must have signed in order to appear here. British comedian and social media star Stephen Fry is interviewed towards the end in a bucolic setting, opining that “even if we’re not destroyed by AI, we will be humiliated by it”, as the camera drifts away distractedly to focus on two small CGI birds. These interviews could easily have blown in from Herzog’s own AI-themed documentary Lo And Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.

With its grey townscapes, empty factories and gelid modernist interiors, About A Hero paints a picture of a world that seems already to be preparing for the departure of the human race, its twilight mood underscored by composer Lasse Aagaard’s melancholic soundtrack. That, at least, is when the film has its serious face on – one it keeps undermining. Around halfway in, a character with a deformed face, who seems to have been enrolled just to deliver this line to camera, says “You’re probably wondering why you’re watching this”. Later, the director himself wonders aloud where the film is going. You can only get away with so many double-bluff quips like this before the audience suspects you might be serious.