Over the course of the twentieth century, science fiction went from being highly optimistic to downright dystopian. Shows like Lost in Space and films like 2001: A Space Odyssey painted a picture of a future that was clean, efficient and basically peaceful. In these types of shows, most of mankind’s problems had been solved. Then, at some point, there was a turn. With films like The Terminator and Blade Runner in the 1980s, the future wasn’t what it used to be. The dark side of the machines was on full display and the future looked bleak and dark. In fact, many of these more dystopian works are literally dark; in Blade Runner it always seems to be raining and the sun never penetrates the Los Angeles smog. In The Terminator as well, most of the action takes place at night, and the scenes of the future are all shrouded in darkness. Dissolved Girl is a short film from writer and director Kai Kaldro that follows this trend of gloomy dystopias. It’s set in Brooklyn in the near future, and, true to the genre, the sun never seems to be shining in NTC.
The production values here are quite good. In fact, it’s at least as good as many newer science fiction TV shows like Another Life. I couldn’t help but wonder while watching this if this short was in fact intended to be the pilot for a future TV series. The plot is open ended, and I was left wondering what was going to happen next. The visuals are fun and the soundscape is quite catchy. The film looks to have been made on a low budget, but Kaldro wisely did not try to do anything that went beyond his means. Most of the film is set in one location with two characters, but there is the strong and convincing suggestions of a much larger and more fascinating world beyond what we see here.
The film proclaims itself to be in the cyberpunk genre. This usually means that the focus is on the down and out side of society in a more advanced, but probably not so great future. This film fits the bill. We follow Lenore Warner, played by Alexandra Faye Sadeghian, a hacker and the eponymous dissolved girl, and an undercover cop robot named Val McGinnis, played by Ivelaw Peters. They’re in the midst of a plan that’s almost too complicated to follow. But they don’t seem to trust each other. And for good reason. Val, like his Terminator predecessor, is constantly looking at a visual display that calculates, for example, the likelihood that Lenore is going to zap him or have a mental breakdown. And Lenore, for her part, doesn’t really trust robots at all after a terrible experience in the past.
To complicate matters, and in the vein of Blade Runner, there’s a suggestion that Lenore herself may be a robot. When Val notices a problem with her eyes, she just explains that there’s a flaw in her retina. Does she suspect that she’s a robot? We don’t know. But the hints are pretty clear that this is a real possibility.
Although there are clear similarities with films of the past, Dissolved Girl would have great potential as a TV series. Probably the most original aspect of the world here is that there are so-called ‘Junkyards’. These are, in the words of the opening prologue, “inner-city robots” that are causing violence and tension with the world around them. In most dystopian shows and films like this, the machines are super-intelligent and have taken over and are trying to eradicate or enslave humanity, or there are a few bad robots that have veered off the path and need to be stopped. In Dissolved Girl, the idea seems to be that there is a whole breed of thuggish robots that are hard to distinguish from human beings. The idea isn’t fully fleshed out here, but there is clear potential for a grim but fun story.
This isn’t Kaldro’s first film. His other shorts include Smoking Kills, which follows an extra-marital affair and Sinner’s Lullaby which takes a page from 1940s film-noir.