Director Miguel Llansó’s latest film Infinite Summer explores adolescence through a dystopian lens during one Estonian summer, when three teens are introduced to a mysterious developer whose meditation app claims to alter their corporeal forms. The film had its world premiere at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Infinite Summer cold opens on a mysterious segment about the Tallinn zoo, shot in black and white to look like an old TV promotional: against footage of chimpanzees who are transparently actors in suits, a narrator explains the history of the zoo, claiming that the animals are kept in environments that replicate the wild such that they “forget they are prisoners.” This line, while hammering its themes right on the nose, nonetheless makes the opening captivate the viewer through its boldness, and creates a thesis statement for the film to come.
This opening is intriguing in part due to its tonal contrast with the rest of the film, which takes place in the countryside yet feels distinctly hypermodern. Mia, a shy teenage girl living in Estonia, has been invited to a summer house by her childhood friend Grete, who had just returned from London. However, Grete has invited nearly ten other people Mia doesn’t know—one of whom, Sarah, seems to always make fun of her for her presumed innocence. Mia is repeatedly put into social situations where she seems unable or unwilling to fit in.
For 30 minutes, Infinite Summer acts as a coming-of-age hangout film that only flirts with its dystopian vibes. Typical summer activities ensue, but instead of phones the teens play with augmented reality headsets that project holograms. Specifically, Grete and Sarah mess around on a dating app that projects a hologram of someone once you’ve matched with them. On this app they meet the elusive Dr. Mindfulness, a developer whose mindfulness app goes beyond any sort of conventional self-help and can literally alter their body chemistry.
After some convincing, Mia decides to try out the app for herself and enters a sequence of colors, swirling clouds, and hallucinatory visions. Sarah and Grete decide to get in on this, but whereas Mia is skeptical of these experiences, they seem to be fully hooked. However, the app proves to have an exhausting and detrimental effect on their bodies, creating space for obvious consequences to come. For Mia, the app is a form of necessary if dangerous escapism, whereas Sarah and Grete carelessly use it as another form of entertainment.
But the film simultaneously unravels a conspiracy plotline that connects the mysterious mindfulness app to machinations within the Tallinn zoo, at which point it loses its already loose focus. The introduction of larger stakes into the world are both noticeably convoluted and inconsequential, and as a result, it loses power as both a Black Mirror–style parable as well as a freeform adolescent romp.
Much of the film’s marketing up to this point boasts its connection to the producers of Everything Everywhere All at Once. While that film is much more thoroughly considered, both unfortunately contain the same shortcomings—each presents a high concept world that is interesting on the merits of its absurdity, which respectively fall apart once the narrative finds the need to make sense of everything. So despite its very competent cinematography and visual effects, Infinite Summer ultimately doesn’t go too much further than its quirky yet intriguing logline, outside of its early moments that offer a glimpse into a modified Estonian adolescence.
Our writer Ryan Yau is reporting on the 28th Fantasia International Film Festival, running from July 28th to August 4th, 2024.
