Mute Review: 4 Ups & 6 Downs

Downs...

6. The Plot Is Surprisingly Dull

Though Mute wears its cyberpunk and film noir influences on its sleeve, it's surprising just how uninteresting the core narrative is.

We follow mute bartender Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) as he attempts to locate his missing girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh), a simple and familiar premise that one hoped Duncan Jones would elevate with his heightened setting.

Sadly, though, when you strip away the shiny gloss, the actual plot itself feels stuck in neutral for pretty much the entire runtime, plodding along and failing to pay off in many ways subversive or unexpected.

It is a story that, more often than not, feels like it's just going through the motions, and as such it's hard to get too invested in what's going on. You'll generally see where it's going a few beats ahead of time, and as such it's easy to see why so many conventional movie studios probably passed on Jones' script.