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Some scripts arrive before their moment. When Noomi Rapace first read Hot Spot, ChatGPT didn’t exist yet. By the time Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s sci-fi thriller reaches theaters — Focus Features releases it in the US on August 21 — the world has caught up with it. Set in a near future ruled by sentient AI, the film throws an investigator and a member of a feared religious sect together over a murder in a refugee camp and lets the questions hang in the air unanswered.
Rapace plays Rana, a woman who has survived wars and arrived, somehow, at faith. She spends most of the film in silence- hiding, watching, communicating with everything except dialogue. It’s a performance built by studying documentaries and real refugee testimonies, and it belongs to a filmmaker who, in Rapace’s words, treats everything on screen as a character: the set, the costumes, everybody in the room.
We spoke with Rapace ahead of the film’s release about intuition, privacy, human error, and growing up on a farm.
Q: What was your first reaction when you read the script? It was written before ChatGPT even came out, a long time ago now.
I was confused and mesmerized and intrigued. I was just like, “This is wild! I’ve never seen this. I’ve never read this.” And knowing Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s work, I don’t know if you saw The Lure, which is just incredible, so original and fun and violent, I thought, this is the perfect director for this. The combination of her and the script was just, okay, I’ve got to do this. It’s a no-brainer.
Q: Watching the film, I felt like I was watching Cronenberg, Kogonada’s After Yang, and Alex Garland all at once. What were your own inspirations for Rana?
Oh wow! I did a lot of research on refugees, on people surviving wars. I almost saw her like a soldier who’s lived through a lot of wars and survived a lot of violence. I didn’t really look at other movies or other performances, I looked at real-life stories, reading a lot and watching documentaries. Just: how did she become the person she is when we meet her in the movie?
I think she lived through a lot of violence and a lot of destruction, and when we meet her, she’s arrived at this place where she’s a believer in love and forgiveness. That journey to find that place was so powerful. I started with something chaotic and brutal; I built a library within myself where she carried memories of something very brutal, and then when we meet her, she is a believer of love.
Q: For most of the film you’re silent, hiding, mysterious. What’s the appeal of playing a character who speaks so little?
I love speaking a little. I love watching movies that communicate with more than words. A lot of scripts I get sent are just so heavy, everything is told through dialogue. The incredible thing with a director like Agnieszka is that everything is communication. The set is a character. The costumes are a character. Everybody in the room is telling you something and has a message. It’s not just the spoken word.
So, I felt like we were given access to a lot of different forms of communication, and all of a sudden, you start to open yourself up more, you open your intuition, something a bit more primal. It was really interesting.
Q: Did your perspective on the film change after ChatGPT came out, after AI became so popular?
I do feel like the movie is more relevant now. It’s connecting to something, asking questions that might be more relevant right now. Because I do think it’s important to look at yourself and ask: do I want to be part of this? How much of my privacy do I want to give away? How much access do I want people to have? Where do I draw the line, and not just follow what everyone is doing because everyone is so excited about the new?
But also, Hot Spot is a fairy tale. It’s a saga. It’s wild. It’s playing with a lot of things and throwing out questions, but it’s not presenting any answers. I want the audience to walk out of the cinema and start to think about stuff. I want the movie to stay with them, whether they like it or not, just to stay.
I love that — leaving the theater with a feeling rather than answers.
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s important to think, to have critical thinking, to think for yourself. To allow yourself to be bored, to put your phone away, to just be you. What is my, where am I in the world? Who am I? To look at yourself and ask: am I the person I want to be? Am I moving in the direction I want to go? Is this my life, or am I just following what everyone else is doing?
Q: I feel like I have to ask: what’s your relationship with AI? Do you hate it? Are you okay with it being used in cinema?
There are a lot of good things coming with it. It’s happening, and I believe in change. But I don’t believe in replacing humans. There are certain movies that could easily use AI because they’re already sort of a fairy tale, a lot of these big studio movies where you’re on wires and a green screen, so detached from reality anyway, shooting conditions that are already removed from something authentic and real.
But certain movies, arthouse movies, indie movies, acting — for me, I’m drawn to the human error. I’m drawn to the cracks. I love when things go wrong. I love the things you can’t predict. I think life shouldn’t be too easy, and everything shouldn’t be served to you — you should make the effort to learn about things.
I grew up on a farm, very close to nature, so I think I’m closer to the soil than to technology. I’m more drawn to humans and real things — things I can touch, things I can smell, than to something artificially made, if that makes sense.
Q: If you were a single shot in a film, what would it look like?
Oh. The camera would move closer and closer and closer to my eye, and then move inside my brain, and you would see a glimpse of everything that’s going on at the same time in my very busy brain.
Hot Spot is in US theaters August 21 from Focus Features.
