Asif Kapadia
To be screened during the BFI London Film Festival, 16 October; wider distribution to be announced
2073 is definitely one of a kind. Asif Kapadia’s new feature premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month and includes elements of documentary, drama, sci-fi and horror. First, he throws us into the dystopian city of New San Francisco, where we find out the world of 2073 has been devastated by some unspecified catastrophe known as the Event – most likely prompted by climate change – sometime in the 2040s.
The planet is now ruled by a group of dictators, libertarians and tech bros who live in their golden cages, exploiting the last available resources and abandoning humanity to death and despair. Kapadia tries to envision what may happen over the next 50 years to lead to this point, zooming in on a woman called Ghost (Samantha Morton), who lives deep in the subterranean levels of a shopping-mall-cum-squatters’ camp.
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Overall, the sequences set in 2073 are brilliantly crafted, mixing CGI exteriors with interiors shot on location or in a studio. Kapadia’s New San Francisco is immersed in fog, battered by sandstorms and poorly lit by a looming red sky. The rich inhabit the highest floors of the few skyscrapers left; the poor live on the lowest levels or underground. The very lucky seem to enjoy life far from Earth, in lush, pleasant, hedonistic space citadels.
Ghost’s story is intertwined with extensive flashbacks built out of archival footage and original interviews from the 1990s to 2023. Here, Kapadia tries to touch on the different causes that produced 2073‘s dystopia. Morton’s voice-over narrates – and often rambles – through both the main story and the flashbacks.
She speaks about the rise of the far right, the environmental impact of big tech companies, tech bros’ thirst for power and profit, mass surveillance, terrorism, religious fundamentalism and more. Big names feature – including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and tech companies like Palantir and Meta, as well as despots and controversial political figures like Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Silvio Berlusconi, alongside Italy’s current prime minister Giorgia Meloni.
In the flashbacks, the film’s flaws begin to surface: its scope is too broad, and Kapadia – constrained by the limitations of a feature-length film – is bound to oversimplify. Society’s multifaceted problems go beyond conventional class struggle or the face-off between corrupt conservatism versus enlightened, inclusive social democracy. And while individual facts cited in the film are often correct, the way they are linked can loosely resemble works where shedding light on global issues becomes a platform for diving into conspiracy theories.
On a more positive note, the film’s narrative pacing is engaging, and its arguments about not giving up on politics and continuing to fight for people’s rights – many of which are drawn from interviews with Nobel prizewinning journalist Maria Ressa and reporter Rana Ayyub – are valid. But their presence, while meaningful, doesn’t guarantee that these parts come together.
The film condemns many of the things that the average person – including this reviewer – dislikes most: the lack of control over technological progress, the growing divide between the rich and the poor, and the risk of sacrificing privacy and human rights for a supposedly safer future. But addressing such huge topics in just 83 minutes is virtually impossible. Despite its captivating aesthetic and sincere warnings, 2073 ends up fading into background noise amid today’s information overload.
Davide Abbatescianni is a film critic based in Rome
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