30/07/2024 - After Crumbs and Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway, Spanish filmmaker Miguel Llansó returns with a more contemplative – but no less bonkers – feature

With his previous two films (2015's Crumbs [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and 2017's Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Miguel Llansó
film profile]) being a heady brew of afro-futurism, pop culture references and general oddity, Miguel Llansó’s latest film seems positively mainstream by comparison. Yet whilst it begins as a coming-of-age drama, the onion that is Infinite Summer [+see also:
trailer
interview: Miguel Llansó
film profile] – which recently had its World Premiere at Fantasia Festival – soon begins to peel its layers and revel in a reality that is delightfully off-kilter.

In the near future, Mia (Teele Kalijuvee-O’Brock, in an engaging performance that foregrounds naivety) is looking forward to a summer spent with friends Sarah (Hannah Gross) and Grete (Johanna Rosin). But after spending time with them, she realises that her friends are much more obsessed with parties and boys than with swimming or hanging out.

After an encounter with an ‘extreme dating’ app and meeting the spaced out Dr Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies), Mia is offered a respirator that will take her to another state of consciousness. But the respirator’s AI decides that Mia is too innocent to take part in what it offers. Not so her friends who decide to experience the respirator themselves. But – with Interpol now investigating Dr. Mindfulness – all is not what it seems, and our protagonists are seemingly possessed by their new experiences.

There’s a much more grounded feeling to Llansó’s third feature, eschewing the absurdist flights of fancy that made up his previous work. Set "20 minutes into the future", this is an instantly recognisable modern world of skyscrapers, housing estates and summer houses. Indeed, what is remarkable about this film is – for the first half at least – the absolutely ordinary nature of everything, save from a few glimpses of technology that remind us that this is set in the future. Whereas previous films of Llansó were littered with the detritus of popular culture, there’s more of a sense of Lynch and Cronenberg here, of pulling back the covers of a dull and humdrum life and finding something disturbing is waiting between the sheets.

The later stages of the film sometimes fall into more obvious genre territory. The bolting of the Interpol investigation onto proceedings sometimes seems a bit leaden, especially with the performances of the detectives being stoic to the point of being wooden. But since the film is shot in Estonia’s capital of Tallinn, one feels a deliberate harking back to classic Soviet films (such as the cult classic 80s movie Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel) in which gritty and one-note protagonists attempt to impose order on otherworldly chaos.

There’s much to digest here: ideas of what growing up will be like for future generations who have everything available to them in an instant, notions of the divides between generations and the ever-growing possibilities afforded by transhumanism that make us question what being 'human actually means. While Infinite Summer is far from a film that provides us with any definitive answers – indeed, the concluding moments of the film pose many, many questions – it continually keeps nagging away at one’s frontal lobes long after the credits have rolled.

After its Fantasia bow, there’ll be plenty of love for this film on the genre circuit and a long healthy life on VOD seems assured. The film was produced by Llansó’s Lanzadera Films, US-based company Savage Rose Films and Estonia-based outfit Tallifornia.