The Fix review: Breathing the air of agency in a toxic dystopia

“We live in a world where nothing can be taken for granted, not even the air we breathe,” go the opening words of The Fix, introducing us to the film’s bleak future, where pollution has filled much of the globe’s atmosphere with a lethal toxin. Yet they are spoken by model Ella McPhee (Grace van Dien), in an ad for ‘breakthrough formula’ AIRemedy (or ‘AIRem’), a pill which, if taken regularly, eases breathing and removes the need constantly to wear a respiratory mask.

AIRem is produced by the Aethera Corporation for which Ella is the literal poster girl. Yet despite all her successes, privileges and perquisites, including a steady supply of the pills (when many are dying without them), she is unhappy with her hedonistic party-girl lifestyle, and the endless drink, drugs and men. “It’s not like I’m saving the world or anything, they just liked my look,” she tells a girl who recognises her from the campaign for Aethera, “I don’t have much else going for me.”

Ella is dissatisfied and disconsolate at the best of times, but particularly so on this of all days, the anniversary of her mother’s suicide. Her mother was an even more famous model, and Ella feels that her own career is just unearned nepotism and the luck of her genes. She longs for change, and wishes there were a way that she could make a real difference – like her diplomat father (Grant Swanby) who is off in the UK advocating for African health.

Little does Ella realise that she is about accidentally to imbibe an experimental serum concocted by rogue scientist Solomon (Keenan Arrison), and that this will irreversibly transform her into someone who – or something which – really does have the capacity to save the world.

Meanwhile Aethera’s head of research Eric O’Connors (Daniel Sharman) is Ella’s dark mirror image. He is also a nepo baby, having inherited his position from his father – the company’s Chairman (Clancy Brown) – but instead of wanting to save the world, he hopes to produce just enough AIRem from dwindling stocks to supply a well-heeled, high-paying élite, and he sees no problem in letting the other 99% simply die. Eric hopes to exploit Ella’s rapidly mutating body to his own venal ends, while he tasks his subordinate Angela (Nicole Fortuin) with tracking down a mysterious revolutionary hacker who risks exposing all of the corporation’s lies to the public.

Following Glasshouse (2021) as the second in writer/director Kelsey Egan’s (loose) canon of toxic dystopias, The Fix presents a near-future Cape Town whose problems – environmental degradation, socioeconomic divides, corporate hegemony, media collusion, eugenics and plutocracy – are all too familiar from our own times. For here genre is being used as a stage to dramatise our present preoccupations and anxieties, even as fixes are found in transformative fantasy. Ella may start off all elegant appearance and skin-deep superficies, but she is able to find her inner prickliness and take wing superheroically into a new world that she can now actively help mould.

Of course, no matter how much The Fix suggests that it might be a redemptive choice, for most of us turning into a human dragonfly is hardly a realistic option in facing the world’s problems. Yet beneath Ella’s physical metamorphosis is a more psychological and ideological one, as she is shaken from her sleepy complicity in a sinister status quo, and at last becomes radicalised against the Man – and so she is a myth and model for change in our own times. Perhaps, after all, there is a world-saving hero within each of us, just waiting to emerge like an adult insect from its chrysalis, and to breathe, perhaps for the first time, the air of agency and autonomy.

The Fix had its UK première as closing-night film at Sci-Fi-London, 22 June