2073: Asif Kapadia’s genre-bending vision of a bleak future deflates rather than mobilises

Fire engulfs a road and thick smoke fills the scorched air as a car flees a scene of devastation. Inside the vehicle, an unseen occupant holds a camera up to the flames. What’s hard to comprehend is that we’re not watching dystopian science fiction: this is found footage of someone fleeing a human-caused disaster. It’s a bold opening to an unconventional film that challenges genre conventions to confront fascism, surveillance infrastructures, and environmental crises. But while its distinctive hybrid form and temporal fluidity – which draw on La Jetée – are absorbing devices, the hopelessness of 2073’s narrative undermines the film’s calls for change. 

Set 48 years from now, in a San Francisco where the state spies on and annihilates dissidents, 2073 uses non-fiction elements (archival materials, original interviews), to suggest that this is not ‘a’ future, but rather ‘ours’. A woman known as ‘Ghost’, who does not speak other than in voice-over, describes her hardship and fear as she creeps through the derelict wasteland of the shopping mall that is her home. Drones and military forces scour the streets for undocumented people; language and art are all but forbidden. Secret museums of film reels, literature, and seashells point to the destruction of culture along with the natural world. 

Throughout, writers Asif Kapadia and Tony Grisoni speculate on a future for privileged audiences in the Global North; Ghost’s projected suffering is, of course, an ongoing reality for many oppressed people around the world. Indeed, 2073 is global in its historiography, referencing networks of right-wing activity spanning Modi in India, Farage and Patel in the UK, Trump in the US, and the contributions that tech firms including Meta and Amazon have made to the proliferation of these political projects. Looking back as far as 1990, the film also refers to the Chinese state’s atrocities against the Uyghur people.

Expert commentary from international activists is both inspiring and a much-needed counterpoint to the violence. Ghost’s words are significant, too. That she is mute is a reminder to us that the so-called voiceless have voices; those who flee tyranny are only silenced by those who choose not to listen to them. However, there’s very little optimism in the film. It’s hard to maintain hope for humanity amid an onslaught of news footage that’s spectacularised by its cinematic scale, and so Ghost’s insistence that we act collectively to avoid a bleak future falls flat. There’s no direction to help us change our behaviours, no suggestion as to how we fight a system that 2073 tells us is all-encompassing. 

As the end credits roll and a surveillance camera stares out at us from the screen, it feels like a missed opportunity. 2073 becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; though there’s much to admire in its form, it leaves the viewer with an overwhelming sense that we’ve already run out of road.

► 2073 is available to stream on BFI Player and other platforms.