Jun 282015
 

narcopolis

Imagine a future where all drugs are legal.  Now imagine there’s time travel as well.  If this feels like a little too much to take in, that’s because, in the context of British director Justin Trefgarne’s ambitious SF thriller Narcopolis, it really is.  The film isn’t bad, and features a lot of interesting ideas, but it’s this attempt to cram in too many audacious SF concepts that ultimately derails it, and uses up valuable running time that could have been used to fix some of Narcopolis‘ myriad plot holes.

Burnt out detective Frank (Elliot Cowan) finds a dead body with half its head missing, its DNA not recognised by the police database (a major aberration in this surveillance state dystopia).  Ordered by his superior (Robert Bathurst) to let the mystery go, Frank tries to concentrate on putting his estranged family back together and continuing his recovery from drug addiction, no mean feat when temptation is on every street corner.  Before long, though, he’s drawn back to the crime scene, only to discover there an unidentifiable young woman (Elodie Yung) who claims to be from the future.  With the help of a reclusive scientist (Jonathan Pryce), Frank hopes to link these strange goings-on to the sinister Ambro corporation, whose founder (James Callis) has spread corruption throughout the entire police department, and will stop at nothing to keep Frank from finding out the truth behind this deadly mystery.

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There’s a difference in storytelling between an ambiguity and a plot hole.  Narcopolis takes some cues from Rian Johnson’s Looper in terms of its rough ‘n’ ready time travel tech; precisely how it works is not important, it simply does.  This is an ambiguity, and one we can be content with.  But Trefgarne’s deliberately opaque approach to the time travel storyline as a whole suggests that he wants us to extend this tolerance for ambiguity to the motivations of some primary characters, and this is too great a stretch.  The fact is that large parts of the time travel plot make little or no sense, and as such the whole storyline ends up feeling like a convoluted mess trying to be too clever for its own good.  It could be that there are perfectly rational explanations for the actions of certain characters, but we’re simply not given enough information to form our own conclusions on the matter.  Worse still, Trefgarne’s flailing around with temporal mechanics leaves precious little room to explore the film’s other (more intriguing) audacious idea, namely a future society where narcotics are legal.  Given that Narcopolis takes its title from this speculative leap, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the wildly fictional setting might prove integral to the film’s plot, but instead it ends up feeling like more of a background detail, one that’s quite incidental to the main storyline.

The film is not without its charms, however.  Cowan gives a satisfyingly terse yet emotional performance as Frank, even if the character’s life is littered with noir cliches, and there’s strong support from Pryce and Callis in extended cameo appearances.  Considering its sub-£1 million budget, Narcopolis‘ visual effects are routinely stunning despite their subtlety, and Trefgarne’s use of various different shooting locations to represent a future London gives the film a peculiar, otherworldly atmosphere, drawing the viewer into the futuristic world he’s created.  That Narcopolis is first and foremost a labour of love is beyond doubt; every frame radiates passion, and the sheer effort and ambition demonstrated by the film-makers is laudable.  High-concept, low-budget SF thrillers like this very rarely get made, and the film deserves to be supported for its audaciousness alone, but it’s frustrating to think how much better it could have been with nothing more than a little script editing.  We should expect great things from Justin Trefgarne and his team at TSquared Films, but sadly Narcopolis falls short of being one of them.

There is currently no UK-wide release date for Narcopolis.