Agata Alexander

(On Cable TV, May 2022) As someone who has read, reviewed and written science fiction for a long time, it bothers me to no end when people assume that, since it’s a speculative genre, it means that you can do anything and everything with it. The best SF works use strong and self-coherent logic, focus on specific themes and manage to keep a tonal unity between elements – on top of the usual requirements of genre fiction. So, when Warning arrives with its collection of dumb incoherent subplots and labels itself as science fiction, well, I get annoyed. The film often gives the feeling that writer-director Agata Alexander was satisfied to glue together a few half-baked ideas, visuals and characters and called it a film. An interwoven tapestry of subplots, Warning struggles to present a consistent film. Sometime it’s about an astronaut drifting in space, sometimes it’s about a woman left bereft by an overbearing digital assistant, sometimes it’s about a robot trying to find an owner. None of this is credible – characters act like caricatures, making redundant points but not being developed as interesting people. Even the film’s ideas feel trite at a time when you can get better material from YouTube. An ensemble of decent actors is featured in the many subplots, but even the best of them don’t have much to showcase. Worse of all, perhaps, is Warning’s complete lack of thematic or tonal unity – best demonstrated by the film’s final sequence in which a half-decent acceptance monologue from a man coming to grips with his own imminent death is instantly destroyed by a dumb final joke. There’s a point in which disappointment turns to loathing, and the only suspense in Warning is figuring out on which side of the line it will fall.