The grim, po-faced tale of human cloning and trafficking behind Connor Storrie’s ‘s first film vehicle since TV’s “Heated Rivalry” made him a hot property is a generic sci-fi clone that gives him almost nothing to work with. He handles the grimness well enough, but mostly projects the aura of a working actor dutifully waiting for something better to come along. Which it did, so job done.
The setting is a bleak, faded future, filmed in Bucharest, where the city’s worn streets serve as a stand-in for a crumbling, concrete-ridden world. Strange flying machines lend a touch of futuristic dazzle to the wide shots, even though the technologies driving the story aren’t shiny or hopeful. Instead, people are copied in grim, shadowy conditions, and their thoughts and visions are recorded and stored on devices that look oddly old-fashioned.
Baxter (Storrie) and April (Lilly Krug) scrape by on low-paying work. He deals organs on the black market, while she has a talent for dreaming — in an era where no one has sleep visions, hers stand out with unusual clarity and detail. April trades her dreams to those who want to feel her sensations, a setup that calls to mind “Strange Days.” It is one of the more promising ideas here, yet the film spends its time in a single gloomy world rather than pursuing it.
Klein (Serban Pavlu) is the local gangster Baxter runs afoul of. The twins’ combined savings aren’t enough to allay the consequences, and soon April disappears. Baxter’s desperate search for her begins, and the story suddenly lurches five years into the future. The world looks much the same, but Baxter’s hair is briefly longer, and April has been cloned into a number of identikit sex workers. Whether Baxter can locate her soul in any one of them, or somehow implant it via her recorded memories, is the film’s big existential question. The characters themselves aren’t drawn with enough warmth or personality for us to really care either way.
Writer-director Michel K. Parandi makes his feature-length directorial debut, and he shows off some clever technical know-how on a tight budget, with Nathan Haugaard’s sheeny widescreen lensing and Oana Novicov’s distressed production design keeping things looking pretty good. The script, penned alongside regular collaborator Jack Coulter, stitches together plot pieces from other, better films into something rather murky and hard to care about. It sits in much the same genre territory as “Hot Spot,” Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparably ragtag, pieced-together take on damaged human identity — a film that fell short, but whose odd creative flair would still come in handy here.
The world of “April X” lacks the fine detail and texture that would make its setting feel real. Its story holds together well enough, but the specifics of Baxter’s life and livelihood are so muddy that he doesn’t capture our full attention. It’s Parandi’s film outlines a dystopia more dull than devastating — though perhaps that’s that gives us the future we ought to fear most.
Key Numbers
- Connor Storrie stars in his first film vehicle since TV’s “Heated Rivalry”
- Writer-director Michel K. Parandi makes his feature-length debut
- Co-writer: Jack Coulter
- Shot on location in Bucharest, Romania
- German actor Lilly Krug plays April
- Local gangster Klein played by Serban Pavlu
Our View
The film isn’t an embarrassment for Storrie, but it’ll be forgotten long before the second-season premiere of the queer hockey phenomenon. Only his most ardently committed new fans will venture out to see this. You can hardly blame “April X” for riding his sudden celebrity and securing a theatrical release — but its script is a patchwork of familiar ideas stitched together without much warmth. The future it outlines is more dull than devastating, and the characters never quite come alive.
It is a dutiful piece of work, not a memorable one. Storrie does what he’s asked, and the movie does too — and that’s the whole story.
Source material: “‘April X’ Review: Connor Storrie Bides His Time in a Generic Sci-Fi Clone,” Variety.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.