FestivalsFilmReview

Restore Point – 27th Made in Prague Festival

Reviewer: Maryam Philpott

Writers: Tomislav Cecka, Robert Hloz and Zdenek Jecelin

Director: Robert Hloz

The final weekend of the 27th Made in Pague film festival includes a screening of a rare Czech sci-fi film, Restore Point, directed by Robert Hloz which had its premier this summer. With a big partnership screening at the BFI Imax as part of the BFI’s sci-fi season, this near-future set story sets humanity against big bad tech which allows people who die unnaturally to be revived. It is a film that outside of its major premise limits the broader technological and digital changes to incremental developments that prove eerily familiar and may well foreshadow our lives by 2041.

Police detective Em Trochinowska is drawn into the absolute murder of leading Restore Point scientist David Kurlstat and his wife who could not be restored. The trail leads to a mysterious activist group known as the River of Life who use terrorist methods to attempt to draw attention to their environmental causes including objecting to the Restore Point process. With her own reason for hating the River of Life, when David turns up after all, Trochinowska uncovers a major criminal conspiracy.

The key to making science fiction work is not the special effects or even the grand uses of technology that challenge what it means to be human, but the credible creation of character and relationships, making sure that wherever they are in time and space, people still behave in exactly the same relatable ways that the audience recognises. That certainly applies here, and the central character Trochinowska is a typically jaded detective described as a lone wolf by her boss but with the kind of flaws and maverick approaches that will definitely solve the case. And this places Trochinowska on a continuum of cinematic detectives from Philip Marlowe to Harry Hole.

The story is suitably bonkers with enough credible underpinnings to work well, and with the amount of personal and biometric data that we all feed into apps and social media, it is never beyond reason that download a human consciousness is feasible within the context of the film. And Hloz also stages just enough of the physical restoration process to delight sci-fi fans, teasingly at first with lots of tubes and mysterious machines to give a sense of reawakening, but later Hloz delivers a full and satisfying Frankenstein moment that is worth waiting for.

In the meantime, there are digital messages that have evolved from bus stops and street-signs to appear on clothing and the front of newspapers – which is more Harry Potter fantasy – but it all adds to the slightly and subtly futurist context that Hloz creates with driverless cars and monolithic Christopher Nolan-style skyscrapers that bend in defiance of architectural rules and gravity. But it is all held together by a familiar police procedural where the villains are more or less the men with all the money and a belief that should they be allowed to play God with human lives.

Andrea Mohylová is hugely watchable as Detective Trochinowska, learning from previous films by managing to be a woman who can do her job without being overshadowed by her emotional backstory. Trochinowska is conflicted at times and takes the wrong course of action as a result but is a cool professional who ultimately gets the job done. Scientist Matej Hádek does well to convey his deteriorating condition with a long memory lapse that makes his position in the institute and the personal impact of the murders an interesting subplot.

We do not see enough sci-fi films produced outside the UK and US, so this new stream for Czech cinemas is a potentially fruitful one, and hopefully Restore Point with be enough to revive interest in this appealing genre.

Restore Point screened at the 27th Made in Prague Festival.

The Reviews Hub Score:

Subtly futurist

Show More
Photo of The Reviews Hub - Film

The Reviews Hub - Film

The Reviews Hub Film Team is under the editorship of Maryam Philpott.

Related Articles

Back to top button
The Reviews Hub