New York: Win tickets to a special advance screening of Hot Spot

New York: Here’s your chance to see Hot Spot, free and early. The A.V. Club is offering our reader the chance to see the new film from director Agnieszka Smoczyńska in New York before it opens on August 21. If you’re in town  on Wednesday, August 19 at 7:30, join us at the AMC Lincoln Square. RSVP at this link here, and arrive early as this screening may be overbooked to ensure the theater gets to capacity. 

An official synopsis reads: 

In Hot Spot, set in a near future society ruled by sentient A.I., a private eye investigates a murder case only to discover a rebel group capable of undermining the digital overlord. As the detective’s identity slowly unravels, his world enters a state of hypnotic meltdown. As you watch Hot Spot, immerse yourself into this world and allow yourself to experience, confront and prove those unnameable fears that pervade modern life. Go on the wild-genre bending ride!

As anyone who’s seen either The Lure or The Silent Twins probably has an idea of what kind of dreamy visuals might be in store with Hot Spot. This new film, Smoczyńska says, is really “about immersion and dreaming.” We’ve shared her full director’s statement below. 

HOT SPOT is a playful homage to sci- fi cinema, but it is also about all of the fears we feel but cannot name.

A wild genre-bending ride set in a near-future society ruled by sentient A.I., the film follows a private eye investigating a murder case only to discover a rebel group capable of undermining the digital overlord. As the detective’s identity slowly unravels, his world enters a state of hypnotic meltdown.

My goal was to describe the DNA of our present — and to touch upon our current fears, in a world where advanced technology is very close to witchcraft.

A.I., climate change, war and global unrest — they all make us fearful, and they all seem “too big for words.”

When Robert Bolesto first wrote the script, which was about five years ago, A.I. was still sci-fi, we were very far from first even hearing about ChatGPT. And yet something was in the air, some anxiety and premonition about our loss of control. About us humans realizing that as we’ve already allowed so much digital presence into our lives, it is bound to take control away from us. The whole film is about that loss of control — about its horror, but perhaps strangely, also about its beauty.

On the surface, HOT SPOT is a cop movie set in the dystopia of the future. There is a cop, there is a murder, and there is new technology that puts all reality under constant surveillance…

…and yet HOT SPOT isn’t about following the plot. It’s about immersion and dreaming.

As you watch HOT SPOT, don’t use the logic you are used to using. Allow yourself to experience it, to take part in a shared dream.

See you on August 19—check out a trailer and poster below.