Noomi Rapace Battles a Sentient AI in Agnieszka Smoczyńska's 'Hot Spot'
A Polish director who once made a horror-musical about man-eating mermaids has turned her hand to a post-apocalyptic AI thriller, and the result is one of the strangest detective films in recent memory. Agnieszka Smoczyńska's Hot Spot, released in the United States through Focus Features, is now in theatres following festival premieres at Fantasia and Poland's New Horizons. Variety published its review on August 20, 2026.
The film is set, as its title cards put it, "nowhere in the future" — a bleached desert scattered with Greek ruins where survivors cling to life on an arid compound. Their survival depends on the Head, a sentient artificial intelligence that supplies water and nourishment and enables telepathic communication among residents. The Head also forces everyone to watch the grisly execution of anyone who breaks its rules. A ritual murder shatters the closed community, and suspicion falls on newly arrived refugees. A police detective named Djonny is assigned to the case.
That description sounds straightforward enough. Then there is Djonny's wardrobe. The detective, played by Andrzej Konopka, stalks the wasteland in a bleach-blond frizzy-permed mullet, giant hoop earrings, Cuban-heeled Beatle boots and a black-and-white lycra biker suit. Noomi Rapace plays Rana, a rebel "cyberwitch" with the power to trigger sustained blackouts in the Head system. Reika Kirishima is Djonny's wife Ayka, an avant-garde musician who keeps disconnecting from the Head. George Aurimas Cris plays their young son, Zen.
Smoczyńska described the project as a personal blend of horror, science fiction and what she called an anti-detective story, when Petit Film joined the production in February 2023 (Variety). The screenplay comes from Robert Bolesto, who previously wrote Smoczyńska's 2015 breakout film The Lure — a genre-defying horror-musical that put the Polish film-maker on the international festival map. Her other credits include Fugue (2018) and The Silent Twins (2022).
The production is a four-country co-production — Sweden, Greece, Norway and Poland — and its distribution path reflects the current market for elevated genre cinema. Focus Features acquired U.S. rights in November 2024 (Variety), while France's The Jokers secured French distribution the following May (Variety). At the Fantasia Film Festival in July 2026, the jury recognised the film for the achievement of its ensemble cast (Variety).
What makes Hot Spot hard to pin down is its willingness to pile genre elements on top of each other. According to the Variety review, the film's plot logic begins to fray around the halfway mark, when a secondary storyline introduces a character with shape-shifting abilities (Variety). Whether that density reads as audacious or messy will depend on the viewer. What is certain is that Smoczyńska has built a world unlike anything else reaching screens this year — a wasteland ruled by a machine, policed by a man in hoop earrings, and haunted by a witch who can pull the plug.
