April X review – Connor Storrie searches for missing twin in dystopian dream-tech sci-fi thriller

Sketchy in every sense of the word, this sci-fi thriller is set in the not-too-distant future in a dystopian concrete city (actually mostly Bucharest looking like itself), where life is cheap but screenwriting conceits are clearly expensive, given most of the main ones here appear to be borrowed from other movies. Brother-and-sister twins Baxter (Connor Storrie, from Heated Rivalry) and April (Lilly Krug) are struggling to get by and mooching around the fringes of the criminal world, doing jobs on a spectrum of legality, though nothing especially harmful to themselves or others. He does petty crimes and she makes wigs and sells downloads of her own uncannily clear dreams (a nod to neglected 90s classics Strange Days and Until the End of the World where dream tech played key roles).

Unfortunately, Baxter and his screw-up associate Ronny (Tourialay Akbari) fall into debt to and afoul with local kingpin Klein (Serban Pavlu), whose persistent use of Yiddish phrases and general parsimoniousness sets up the characterisation just on the edge of antisemitism. When Baxter cleans out his and April’s joint accounts and still comes up short, someone takes April and her archive of recorded dreams/memories. Suddenly, the action jumps ahead five years in the future and April is both still missing and yet, at a local brothel, all too ubiquitous where it seems she’s been cloned to make numerous sex workers.

This nasty spin on human trafficking gets progressively ickier as the last act unfolds, especially as the film both wants us to be repulsed by the situation and seemingly titillated judging by all the shots of Krug, duplicated digitally, having sex with clients or sitting around languidly in lingerie. There’s a bit of jagged editing to make things look cleverer than they are, and lashings of hard-boiled voiceover narration from Storrie. The latter does his best to bring conviction to the material, but this is not a work that will feature prominently in his CV in the years to come.