It would be nice to say that Connor Storrie burned up the screen in “April Adopting Harrison Ford’s “Blade Runner,” among a few other takeaways from the sci-fi classic in this sci-fi filler, Storrie deftly shoulders a grim, morose tale of human cloning and trafficking in a beige dystopian future, but there’s not much here for him to work with — and he mostly projects the aura of a working actor dutifully waiting for something better to come along. That’s it, it’s over. But you can’t blame “April
Of course, only Storrie’s most ardent new fans will dare to see this: It’s not an embarrassing blemish on his resume, but it will be forgotten long before the gay hockey phenomenon’s second season premieres. For writer-director Michel K. Parandi, who will be making his feature debut, “April But his screenplay, written with regular collaborator Jack Coulter, is less impressive, cobbling together story scraps from other, better films to create a rather blurry, uninteresting effect. It occupies similar genre territory as the recent “Hot Spot,” Agnieszka Smoczynska’s relatively messy, patchwork vision of human identity imperiled in the middle-distant future; that film failed, but a measure of its imaginative eccentricity would still be welcome here.
The year is not specified, but the tired, brutalist housing blocks on the outskirts of Bucharest still stand: Although it does not specify a location, “April X” uses the present-day wear and tear of the Romanian capital, where the film was shot, as shorthand for a world reduced to a concrete ruin. The odd high-tech drone adds futuristic pizzazz to the film’s exterior landscapes, but the new technologies that define the narrative aren’t of the bright, brave new-world variety: People are cloned in dirty, shadowy ways, while memories and dreams can be captured and downloaded onto surprisingly retro-looking data devices.
In this dirty waking nightmare, twin sisters Baxter (Storrie) and April (German actor Lilly Krug) barely make ends meet doing a variety of sketchy jobs, some more criminal than others. While he deals in organs on the black market, he has a special gift for dreaming: Apparently, at a time when no one had sleep visions anymore, his were enviably clear and vivid as to be marketable. April selling her dreams to others who want to experience her feelings isn’t a new idea — a callback to “Strange Days” — but it’s one of the most fruitful ideas here, and it goes frustratingly untapped as the film continues to explore a single bleak reality.
We’re more interested in Baxter; Baxter’s underworld dealings eventually run afoul of local gangster Klein (Serban Pavlu), and the twins’ combined savings are not enough to mitigate the dire consequences. Shortly thereafter, April disappears and Baxter begins a desperate search for her. The story continues as we suddenly lurch five years into the future: The world looks much the same, except her hair is slightly longer, while April has apparently been cloned into a series of identical sex workers. Whether he can find his brother’s soul in either of them, or somehow implant it through his recorded memories, is the film’s biggest existential question—but the characters themselves aren’t drawn with enough warmth or personality to really care either way.
Storrie gets through it all with a tight jaw and a steely glare, but the world of the film never quite comes to life. Nathan Haugaard’s glossy widescreen lensing and Oana Novicov’s grungy production design make it look pretty good, but “April Parandi’s film outlines a dystopia that’s more boring than devastating—though perhaps that’s the future we should really be afraid of.