Duncan Jones' 'Mute', Netflix, review: What did I just watch?

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Alexander Skarsgård plays Leo, a mute Amish bartender – mute, I assume, simply because Jones felt like writing a mute protagonist, the character’s inability to talk being quickly explained at the film’s opening with a flashback to an accident where Leo’s throat was sliced by a speedboat propeller. So that’s the lay of the land, and how wildly undulating it is, the action cutting between Skarsgård running around futuristic Berlin – which looks like if Warner Bros licensed a Blade Runner theme park – with a weaponised table leg he’s whittled, and Rudd and Theroux, whose character names are Cactus and Duck by the way, tenpin bowling and shooting the shit and perving on girls like they’re in deleted scenes from Dazed and Confused. In The Shape of Water, Sally Hawkins gave an incredibly moving performance as a mute, conveying so much emotion without words, whereas Skarsgård is just frustratingly silent and dull, to the point where it feels less like he’s a mute and more like he’s just doing the whole hard-boiled, Liam Neeson, no-need-for-words-when-I-can-thump-henchmen-with-my-table-leg character thing we know from revenge thrillers. The film somehow simultaneously looks like it cost $100 million and $100,000, which, in fairness, might just be down to how emphatically Blade Runner 2049‘s VFX team knocked it out of the ‘dystopian vista’ park recently, while the score, left to provide the emotion while the protagonist is silent, overdoes this and generally feels quite amateurish.