Look, we all love a good end-of-the-world story, but in order for these to work, viewers have to be convinced that the world is actually, uh, ending. Otherwise, you’re left trying to understand why everyone on screen is behaving so strangely until eventually the sun explodes or the asteroid hits and the earth as we know it is dunzo. The problem with Agata Alexander’s latest film Warning is that even her characters don’t seem to be all that aware of their impending doom.
Set in a not-too-distant future, the film operates as a kind of Black Mirror-esque anthology where multiple stories are told over the film’s short runtime, each one dealing with a peculiar aspect of the current society and its relationship to technology. To be fair, some segments are interesting, and if given the time and space, they might have translated well into their own feature length films.
Take the story of Claire, for example. She is a deeply religious woman with a strong devotion to her Alexa-like device that she calls “God.” Every morning, God wakes her up with an inspirational quote and observes her throughout the day, taking care to chastise her each time she commits a sin. But when God suddenly stops working and Claire is forced to “pray manually,” her relationship to both God the machine and God the spiritual entity begins to fracture.
Or perhaps you might find yourself interested in the story of Nina and Liam, two lovers who are set to marry, only to be dissuaded by Liam’s controlling parents. You see, Liam and his family are of a higher “tier” than Nina, and all of them were able to choose eternal life when they were born. Nina, however, is just a mere mortal, and her mortality is the main factor standing between her and Liam’s parent’s approval.
These are just two of a very large sampling of stories that come into play throughout the film. The problem is that the movie leaves virtually every single one of them completely unresolved.
Warning is frustrating for its lack of ability to connect its stories in some meaningful way. There are attempts at this, sure, but all of them are either tangential at best or so subtle that the laziest of viewers might not ever even notice the connections.
Take the whole “world ending” scenario, for example. Each individual vignette tries to incorporate the knowledge that a large asteroid is currently set to pass by Earth in the next few days. Radios and televisions quietly broadcast the story in the background of many key scenes, but none of the characters ever seem to realize this very real possibility of their impending doom. Instead, all of them operate as if this is just another regular day in their lives, until eventually the world bursts into flames and the only person left is the astronaut from the beginning of the film who is now, ironically, the last man alive even though he has been left to die in space after a horrible satellite malfunction ruins his ability to return to Earth. Sheesh.
Still, despite a lack of continuity and resolution, many of the stories remain compelling, and that ultimately makes this anthology infuriating to watch. Just when you find yourself caring for a character or believing you are going to find resolution, the direction shifts, never to return to what it just spent the last 15 minutes making you care about. Perhaps this is supposed to be some bullshit commentary on how we all must live every day as if it’s our last and that resolution is not always possible, but in the case of Warning, it just feels like an overachieving attempt to fit as many good ideas into one single, very short runtime. If you’re a fan of Black Mirror, Ready Player One, and any movie involving a sentient robot, you might find something to love here, but for the rest of us, we can heed the film’s title and just skip it.
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