Hot Spot (2026) Review: A Sci-Fi Mystery That Makes No Sense

This review contains some spoilers, but does not reveal the ending.

For a little while, I found Hot Spot somewhat interesting. Something was entertaining about presenting this bizarre dystopia with such confidence, as I waited for cyber witches and an all-knowing artificial intelligence to fit together coherently. Even the ridiculous detective at its center initially seemed like someone I might enjoy watching for the wrong reasons. I was genuinely curious to see how far the absurdity would go. Unfortunately, that curiosity changed to impatience pretty quickly. By the time the film started pushing toward its larger revelations, I just wanted it to end.

Stream, rent, or purchase Hot Spot on Amazon.

Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska and written by Robert Bolesto, Hot Spot follows a detective (Andrzej Konopka) as he investigates a murder in a society dominated by sentient AI. His investigation brings him into contact with Rana (Noomi Rapace), a woman associated with a group capable of disrupting the system. The case gradually becomes entangled with questions about the detective’s own identity.

That setup has potential. A murder investigation provides a good avenue to explore an unfamiliar society and reveal how people live, what they fear, and what controls them. I was willing to let the film establish those connections gradually. Its mixture of technological dependence, religious outsiders, and supernatural possibility suggested that the investigation might lead somewhere stranger than an ordinary futuristic conspiracy.

But I kept waiting for the world to acquire enough definition for any of this to matter. The AI is the most persistent problem. Its reach is extensive enough to make ordinary privacy seem almost obsolete, yet important information remains conveniently unavailable to the AI at random times. There are suggestions of permissions, restrictions, and gaps in access, but I never got a sense of how those limits worked. The system seemed to know an extraordinary amount about people, until, you know, it didn’t.

I get that a pervasive AI can have blind spots, competing priorities, or restrictions that prevent it from solving every crime immediately. Those limitations could provide the basis for an interesting mystery. Here, however, I was repeatedly trying to work out what information the system should already possess. I needed some confidence in the conditions of the investigation before I could become invested in its discoveries.

Instead, the uncertainty spreads into almost every encounter. If the AI has access to nearly everyone’s mind, and people who “log off” too often or go off script, so to speak, are liable to have their heads explode, what makes a particular piece of information inaccessible? How much can anyone conceal? The film gestures toward answers without actually providing them. Eventually, the digital overlord begins to resemble an unreliable internet connection. It works most of the time, but it has huge blind spots for indefinable reasons.

I had reservations about the pacing and complexity of Blade Runner 2049, but its world gives the investigation recognizable stakes. The treatment of replicants, their relationship to human authority, and the danger attached to the central discovery provide something solid beneath the uncertainty. In Hot Spot, I kept having to reconsider the basic conditions under which the characters were acting.

The protagonist makes that effort considerably less appealing. His appearance and mannerisms seem calculated to make him an unconventional, memorable detective, but that calculation is painfully visible. I spent more time noticing the attempt to make him look interesting than finding anything interesting about him. There’s an air of self-conscious cool surrounding the character that becomes increasingly embarrassing as the film asks us to take his personal crisis seriously. Also, his hair is far too distracting for its own good.

Konopka’s performance does little to overcome that problem. The detective needs to carry us from an investigation into something far more destabilizing, yet I struggled to identify a compelling personality beneath the styling. His eccentricity is just another detail the audience is expected to accept on trust. As the revelations accumulate, the character grows harder to understand, and my interest in understanding him steadily diminishes.

Rapace’s scenes offer some relief, but not much. There are sequences involving Rana in which the atmosphere becomes more threatening, and the imagery suggests something beyond the muddled investigation. For a few minutes, I could see the appeal of bringing witchcraft into a world governed by technology. Rana also suggests a more interesting perspective on this society: someone whose relationship to its dominant system might expose what that system cannot accommodate.

Unfortunately, these moments keep returning to the same underdeveloped mythology. The cyber witches are feared because they can meddle with the AI, but the film gives that interference little definition. Their abilities remain difficult to distinguish from the general instability literally everyone else can cause. I could understand why disrupting a system people depend upon would be dangerous. I had much less understanding of what these people could actually do, or how their powers related to the world the film had established.

That vagueness weakens the fear. Each new development requires another adjustment to an already uncertain set of possibilities. I found myself waiting to learn whether a strange event represented a major discovery or an ordinary feature of this future. Eventually, even potentially alarming moments began to feel inconsequential.

The shortage of resources could have made the technological dependence more persuasive. If people rely on the AI to survive under conditions of scarcity, then being disconnected might involve a meaningful conflict between freedom and material security. The strongest dystopian films about power and social control give their institutions a recognizable hold over everyday life. Hot Spot introduces deprivation, then does surprisingly little to make it shape the drama.

The people living outside the system are similarly frustrating. Their presentation as religious desert outsiders offers an immediate visual distinction, but I wanted some understanding of the lives being organized beyond the AI’s reach. How do these communities survive? What sustains their beliefs? What does rejecting the system cost them? They remain vaguely mysterious, leaving a potentially important alternative society as another poorly developed part of the background.

Then there’s the tiger. When the film suggests that its detective might himself be a cyber witch capable of becoming a tiger, my reaction was mostly exhausted disbelief. I could see possible associations with violence, repression, or an identity breaking apart. Yet I was still struggling to understand what being a cyber witch meant. Introducing another extraordinary possibility at that stage only made the character feel more arbitrary.

Even the dramatically thin Ghost in the Shell (2017) reboot establishes a comprehensible relationship between its protagonist’s altered body and her uncertainty about herself. Hot Spot gives its detective increasingly strange qualities without building a persuasive connection between them. By the later stretches, I could no longer tell what these developments were supposed to clarify about him.

The film expects a willingness to surrender to its weirdness. At first, I was game. I laughed at the awkwardness, enjoyed a few of Rapace’s scenes, and waited to see whether the scattered ideas would lead to anything. But the writing kept making demands on an investment it had done very little to sustain. Each new complication gave me more to process and less reason to care.

By the end, the early amusement had disappeared. The AI was still an unconvincing foundation for the investigation, the witches remained vaguely defined, and the detective’s personal unraveling was very tedious. A few striking sequences briefly suggest a film with something disturbing to say about technological control. Most of Hot Spot leaves those possibilities buried beneath a story that is increasingly difficult to follow and decreasingly worthwhile to untangle.

Hot Spot (2026) Rating: ★1/2 out of 5

If you’d like to watch Hot Spot, you can stream, rent, or purchase it via Amazon.