The Fix (2024) starts with an advert: there’s apparently a product available which will enable people to ‘breathe the air again’. Uh-oh; so it sounds as though director Kelsey Egan’s interest in environmental sci-fi and horror is still intact, if being given a different level of reach here than in previous films, such as Glasshouse. This air remedy is being marketed by a vast global corporation (there’s always a vast, global corporation) called Aethera, and they can be assured of a market because – in the version of the planet imagined here – 86% of people now live in a ‘red zone’ where the air quality is at its worst, since being polluted by an array of toxins which make people very sick. But it comes at a price. If anyone ever saw the phenomenal short film The 3rd Letter, then the initial world-building here’s very similar, save for the fact that when Grzegorz Jonkajtys made his film, Covid and compulsory mask-wearing was a distant dream. In the world according to The Fix, mask-wearing, filters and prospective cures are the only way to go, if you can’t afford Aethera’s wares.
The girl who was selected for the advert is called Ella, and whilst she enjoys some privileges as a fairly moneyed, sheltered young woman, she’s not totally immune from day to day concerns. Not only is her social circle very limited, but her boyfriend and her best friend are more interested in each other than in her, and what’s more – they have got themselves into a dangerous situation, taking an interest in an underground drugs industry which just might have a panacea for the world’s predicament. Posing as a buyer, boyfriend Troy pockets an experimental serum and makes away with it. This is all evidence that the general population is getting tired of Aethera’s monopoly on wellness, seeking to take matters into their own hands. But as with any untrialled medicine, there are risks, so when an embittered Ella decides to glug down the entire stolen phial when she takes it from her two-timing boyfriend after a confrontation, she unwittingly becomes the test subject. This immediately seems to propel her to keep shedding her clothes, but that’s by the by.
Ella begins to undergo mutations – superhero-style mutations, mutations which strangely don’t do too much to make her look unappealing (an ear falls off, though thankfully under her hairline) but give her a fairly broad spread of new abilities: she develops super strength, can climb up walls and can spit venom (!) Perhaps most pertinently to the planet’s main problem, she also seems able to breathe the air without being reduced to a snivelling, bleeding husk like her fellow citizens, so there’s that. Hey, perhaps this new drug could equip humanity with what it needs to survive – and much more? This possibility is of course anathema to Aethera, who have little truck with the mutations per se, but more of an issue with anyone who might break their monopoly by choosing to distribute the drug for free. Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of Ella.
This isn’t a dreadful idea by any means, but The Fix struggles on several fronts. The first is the big muddle of deja-vu you experience as you watch: it feels simultaneously so similar to a raft of existing titles, but probably works less successfully than most of those, for reasons which we’ll return to. There’s Rabid (either version); MadS; The Titan; New Life; Bite; any film where a key character undergoes isolating, traumatic and barely-understood bodily changes, be these viral or structural, would fit the bill. Being derivative isn’t necessarily the end of a new film, but feeling like a scant retelling of elements which are more consistently fleshed-out in pre-existing films…kinda is.
There are a lot of issues here, but in the main this comes down to Egan’s poorer handling of bigger-picture world-building, with a larger cast, the need for different levels of exposition and issues around the scientific and technological plot points all showing the strain. In the first few minutes of the film alone, it is so crammed with exposition that it tumbles out too quickly; because so much is discussed so fast, it feels like the bigger ideas here are only ever given lip service. Once briefly addressed, these things fall by the wayside. It feels as though it wants to dispense with the clearly limited cast of Glasshouse, but does this by sending out an array of minor characters who are never established enough to matter. Or, in an attempt to give them deeper profundity/to try once again to explore those big concerns, they are given reams of dialogue which feels unconvincing. Sad to say, Aethera head honcho Eric O’Connors (Daniel Sharman) suffers the most at the hands of the script, being positioned as the mouthpiece for, essentially, a nightmare version of Big Pharma, which means parroting sinister opinions and lofty concerns about the planet’s state of play. It’s inconsistent; The Fix has underwritten characters and overwritten ones, issues with pace which sees the film go from full throttle to torpor, and then – it doesn’t know what to do, really, except to follow an increasingly fairy-like Ella around, to see what’s going to happen.
What happens is that the film is clearly gunning for a sequel, even a franchise, which seems, on balance, unlikely. I keep coming back to Glasshouse, as that played more to Egan’s strengths as a director and writer, with its defiantly slow-burn approach, a small cast to get to know, and a drip-drip-drip approach to tension. Microcosm, not macrocosm, seems to be where it’s at for her. But for all that, it’s hard not to warm to Egan’s commitment to her key theme of interest, and that includes the different approaches she’s taken so far, even where some of these are more successful than others. The Fix may be an unlikely candidate for an environmental superhero franchise, all things considered, but Egan is still an interesting and engaging director whose greatest film is probably still ahead of her.
The Fix (2024) is available to stream now.