Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of a past-, future-, and present-day Rwanda in the age of global communication. The film opens on a coltan mine where laborers work under slave-like conditions. As some villagers beat out a work song on tribal drums, armed overseers gaze down into quarry pits and strike miners who are deemed to be slacking at their work. Coltan is used primarily for the production of the tantalum capacitors used in many electronic devices, and Neptune Frost repeatedly stresses how the global commodity chain of electronics depends on the extractive industries in third-world countries.
But just as the film bitterly understands that global communication wouldn’t be possible without the exploitation of third-world laborers, it also revels in the ways in which technology impacts social change and, more intimately, human connectivity. Williams and Uzeyman introduce their protagonists, intersex hacker Neptune (played by both Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja) and coltan miner Matalusa (Kaya Free), far apart from each other but link them in a shared dreamspace filled with computer cables and monitors that suggests a physical manifestation of the internet. Both seek to flee oppressive conditions, and across various digital worlds the filmmakers set them on a path toward physical communion.
The focus on this journey causes Neptune Frost to flirt with incoherence as it does an intense double Dutch between genre modes—namely between a somber, paranoid thriller and a cosmic romance—without sufficient connective tissue. Both Neptune and Matalusa are chased by military and police forces for fleeing their homes, though it’s difficult to tell what motivates this search given how everything is nebulously defined. Things only get more complicated after Neptune undergoes their transformation and Isheja takes over the role from Ngabo, at which point this stubbornly anti-narrative Neptune Frost also becomes an examination and expression of non-binary identity, which plays into how the other characters deal with them and especially how Matalusa reacts when they both finally meet in the real world.
If its narrative threads don’t exactly cohere, Neptune Frost nonetheless uses its musical structure and lo-fi Afrofuturistic aesthetic to make palpable thematic and political statements. Many of the characters wear costumes embellished with computer parts, such as a cloak of keyboard keys that Matalusa wears with all the regalia of a royal cape. Through their art, Williams and Uzeyman effectively position Africa at the beginning and end of tech’s life cycle, for supplying the raw materials for the global commodity chain only for its people to belatedly receive the products made from such materials after they’ve been discarded by the West.
Neptune Frost’s mixture of traditional and retro-futuristic clothing also speaks to a shifting sense of cultural identity within Africa, one still rooted in a rich history but increasingly adapting to a globalized world. Williams and Uzeyman’s use of music similarly clarifies what their story often struggles to articulate: that of the power of ideas and movements to gain traction and spread in the modern age. At one point, the work song played at the coltan mines morphs into a chant of protest when a laborer is badly injured in front of his uncaring bosses, which then spreads over the course of a montage to inspire gatherings in cities and universities thanks to the internet’s ability to broadcast the protests in real time.
A staple of the musical format is the break in reality where characters freely express feelings that polite society tends to silence, but the characters here sing as a means of chafing against a global silence, demanding to be heard by the powers that continue to exploit Africa well after the supposed end of colonialism. At one point, Matalusa laments, “We do the work that is hidden behind their screens,” and later another character offers a pointed revision of that outlook by arguing: “We are not hidden. We are ignored.” Neptune Frost, for all its freewheeling visual ideas and complex politics surrounding its narrative, is direct and lucid about its characters’ needs for the outside world to not only recognize the toil that makes the luxuries of contemporary life possible, but to also be welcomed into it.
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