Mute

Mute is a baffling movie that strings us along as if it is building to something meaningful, but which ultimately amounts to almost nothing. The setting and tone are so chaotic and the characters’ motivations and actions so ambiguous, I was screaming at the screen 80 minutes in just for some sort of clarity or at least a development or two.

Alexander Skarsgård plays Leo, the titular mute, his vocal cords destroyed in a boyhood accident and surgery forbidden by his Amish family. As an adult he tends bar in the seedy underworld of near-future Berlin, a setting that would have been the movie’s one selling point if Blade Runner 2049 didn’t already exist. Leo is in love with Naadirah, a waitress in the same night/sex club. She goes missing and Leo embarks on a desperate private investigation to find her. This involves endless scenes of the genteel, mute protagonist confronting transvestites and gangsters, and much is made about Naadirah’s past but nothing of substance is ever revealed to us. Meanwhile, we also follow Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux as two AWOL military surgeons, Americans, who lend their skills as mob torturers. Rudd has a young daughter, which at first feels like an attempt to humanize his reprehensible character, but who ultimately exists in the story as little more than a litmus test to reveal which adult characters are good or evil (hint: only one is good). Theroux’s character is alternately a life-saving surgeon and a… very bad person.

We bounce back and forth between Leo’s quest and the truly confusing adventures of Rudd and Theroux, believing that the film is surely heading toward a climax in which these two stories will intersect in some kind of meaningful and dramatic way. While the characters do indeed converge and events transpire which qualify as plot points and revelations, nothing makes any emotional sense nor feels even slightly organic or “earned.” Things just happen, mostly awful things, and the movie limps to a pathetic end.