2073 review – Asif Kapadia rages against the death of democracy and our planet

Asif Kapadia takes on big subjects in a vehement drama-doc fantasy of just 85 minutes: climate change, corporate fascism, the global erosion of democracy. And if the result feels occasionally strident, or redundant, or choir-preaching, then maybe that is just a function of the vast and implacable importance of what he’s talking about.

This is the elephant in the room, the insidious gradual diminution of our freedoms, and addressing it head-on like this (which is probably the only way to address it) is arguably to sacrifice subtlety and nuance and the more calibrated filmic language that has made Kapadia’s films, about pop-culture icons such as Diego Maradona and Amy Winehouse, more approachable. And yes, those films worked better on their own terms, but that’s not to deny the force or the relevance of what he’s attempted here.

2073 is a sombre futurist reverie, broadly inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, in which Samantha Morton plays a woman in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a survivor who evidently lives hand-to-mouth, periodically cranking up a windup torch and brooding on how things got this way. How indeed?

What we then get is a melange of present-day news archive footage of future-is-now climate catastrophe from our own times (some of it familiar) juxtaposed with sinister images of police all over the world clamping down on protest, and the grimly familiar gallery of mediocre plutocrats – Modi, Xi, Trump, Putin, Orbán – together with their tech bro enablers and fellow travellers such as Bezos and Zuckerberg. This is the military-industrial complex of power, soft and hard, the billionaires in step with ruthless nationalist strongmen and strutting fascists who carry on promoting their belligerent paranoia while the earth gradually – and not so gradually – heats up to unbearable levels.

Kapadia quotes political observers such as George Monbiot and Anne Applebaum on a voiceover basis and perhaps the substance and power of the film would have been greater if they had been allowed to develop their distinctive critique at greater length. But they certainly make their presence felt. 2073 is certainly a relevant shout of rage against the authoritarian forces despoiling our democracy and our environment – and the bland and complaisant naivety that’s letting it happen.

• 2073 screened at the Venice film festival