Well, this is going to be a challenge. A film that seems specifically engineered to defy easy descriptions or classifications, made by a Hip Hop artist who has made an entire career out of making such things. Saul Williams is one of the culture’s true original and unique talents, as it’s difficult even fathoming anyone else attempting half the shit he pulls on record. Like fellow slam poet and MC Sage Francis, he doesn’t so much engage in wordplay as he does word-bullying, deconstructing and then reconstructing the English language over the course of a few lines, let alone a verse. On top of that, his choice of production blends old-school Hip Hop, rock, electronica, industrial, and about a skrillion other things to create a sonic whirlwind that is as verbose as it is fascinating to engage with. And now he’s made a movie.
Neptune Frost, written by Williams and co-directed by him and his wife Anisia Uzeyman, is an expansion of his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. It’s something of a jukebox musical, since it includes a lot of songs both from MartyrLoserKing as well as 2019’s Encrypted & Vulnerable, but they’ve been translated both linguistically and musically here. The story focuses on a community of hackers in a village in Burundi, and all of the music is delivered in the local languages (I won’t pretend to know any African languages, but I see Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, and French listed alongside some passages in English, so let’s go with that). Williams’ polemic statements of intent turn into something that could’ve been passed down by a griot (and there’s an argument to be made that it has), and the performances are fantastic throughout.
From the foundation of the music, the film’s story mainly involves the relationship between transgender communicator Neptune (Elvis Ngabo/Cheryl Isheja) and former miner Matalusa (Kaya Free), showing their efforts to rebel against the colonialist forces that are hollowing out their land and their people. It’s an intersection of Afro-futurist and cyberpunk aesthetics that uses a key overlap between them as its mission statement: Technology, and the capacity it has to connect everyone on the planet through the Internet, is made possible off the back of Black workers. Without them being exploited to mine out coltan and other resources, I would not be able to write down these words, nor would you be able to read them.
Through the… let’s be general and call them ‘unorthodox’ filmmaking techniques, it’s like an amplified version of something like The Matrix, where technology and spirituality are intertwined and both necessary in order to create one’s true identity. Not the one that’s been forced by circumstance of birth, but the one chosen. Actually, with how its depiction of hacking goes beyond merely interacting with computers and right into hacking reality in a very literal sense, it’s even closer to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles with its peculiar flavours of sci-fi psychedelia. The way it depicts these hackers existing as souls within the vast network of the Internet also reminded me a bit of clipping.’s Pain Everyday, which described the victims of racial lynchings haunting their attackers by possessing digital audio and video files.
And on top of all of its fiery anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric, it also takes no prisoners when it comes to queer representation as well. It has some choice words about male insecurities regarding what other people decide about their own preferences and identities, and it also goes one step beyond stuff like Titane in transcending binaries. Man and woman, gay and straight, class, culture, the real world and the Internet; much like with Saul Williams’ music, it knocks down the walls ostensibly separating different categories to create a singular experience that fits none of them, and yet all of them at the same time.
It's a cinematic treatise as dense as listening to every John Coltrane solo at the same time, but one packing some important food for thought and an inescapably powerful soundtrack. At a point in Western culture where it seems like all those seminal cyberpunk works by Gibson, Sterling, and Rucker are closer to being fact than ever, this serves as a vital acknowledgement of and reclamation for who this advancement truly belongs to.
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