Neptune Frost Review: a bold, bizarre, afropunk sci-fi music adventure

This review by Neptune Frost originally ran in conjunction with the film’s premiere at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. It was updated and re-released for the film’s theatrical and virtual cinema release.

“You might be wondering, WTF is that? Is it a poet’s conception of a dream?”

These are the first words spoken by Neptune Frost, the eponymous protagonist of Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams’ Afrofuturistic musical after a life-threatening motorcycle accident, miraculous revival, and subsequent transformation. That’s a reasonable question that viewers will ask themselves at several points throughout the film’s weird, circuitous odyssey.

Williams and Uzeyman’s “anti-capitalist cyber-musical” was filmed and set in and around Rwanda and Burundi and produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda” and Cheryl Isheja). Spurred on by the loss of their mother, they embark on a journey of self-discovery and reinvention. Pursued by a oppressive police force known only as “The Authority,” Neptune is inexplicably drawn to a mysterious village cobbled together from discarded e-waste and home to a small hacktivist enclave of revolutionaries and a coltan miner named Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse , a musician who performs as “Kaya Free”) who mourns the death of his younger brother Tekno. Together, the two form a bond that manifests as a force threatening to reverse the parasitic relationship between Western technology and the Global South. There are also musical numbers!

That’s a lot to blame for first-time visitors, let alone anyone unfamiliar with it Neptune Frost is technically an adaptation of William’s 2016 concept album MartyrLoserKing, from which the film’s score and soundtrack are heavily derived. At times bewildering, if relentlessly mesmerizing, Neptune Frost fuses searing anti-establishment lyricism with ethereal electronics to create a film and universe worthy of its place alongside Sun Ra’s space is the place and 2019 I snuck off the slave ship. The costumes a Neptune Frostcreated by multidisciplinary artist Cedric Mizero are particularly striking – they use materials such as discarded circuit boards, loose cables and even bicycle wheels to create designs that oscillate between the eccentric and otherworldly.

Image: Sundance Institute

Neptune Frost isn’t particularly keen on explaining itself. Instead, it grapples relentlessly with the nature of boundaries and how to hack them: it looks at the demarcations of class and capital, gender and sex, the powerful and the exploited, and then looks at how those distinctions are formed and how they erode can be re-examined and re-imagined through the power of love, community and awareness of the value of one’s labor in the global supply chain. Neptune Frost

As intriguing as these questions are, none of them would be exciting if it weren’t for the music that acts as such Neptune Frost‘s primary mode of presentation. The high-level concepts of the film’s premise blend perfectly with the eclectic sonic palette of its Afropunk-inspired soundtrack. The tracks taken from William’s 2016 album MartyrLoserKing were re-orchestrated and rearranged to fit the film’s context. The lyrics have been rewritten into a Swahili and English, French and Kirundi medley, reflecting the global mindset at the heart of the film and a reflection of Rwanda’s rich, diverse cultural background. It’s not the kind of musical that people feel compelled to memorize the lyrics and belt out, but you’ll likely find yourself nodding in time to the beat.

Neptune Frost is about the connection between joy and anger, between celebration and introspection, between a community and the individual. More specifically, it’s a film about a disenfranchised collective that seizes power over the technology that has built its own life and work and uses it to express a message that has gone unheard. “Technology was my brother’s name,” Matalusa tells his fellow hackers in the film’s final act. “It is technology that guides us today. They use our blood and sweat to communicate with each other, but have never heard our voice. Until now.”

Image: Sundance Institute

Even though Neptune FrostWhat may at first seem like a stray shot, ‘s message rings out loud and clear in the film’s climax, which is punctuated by an explosive act of state violence that doesn’t quench the resistance, only seems to have fueled it. Neptune Frost is a bold, bizarre and unabashedly self-aware debut that prompts its audience to question the very real human costs of the information age through the speculative lens of a future both vastly different and uncannily similar to our own.

Neptune Frost opens June 3 in New York, followed by city-to-city rollout. Check the film’s website for local listings and upcoming seasons.