A Deepfaked Werner Herzog Tackles AI

Most films want their audiences to suspend disbelief. “About a Hero” would prefer they keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution in trusting its visual and auditory components,” runs an onscreen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz‘s irreverent exercise in AI-enabled storytelling — a knowingly contentious opening film for this year’s IDFA documentary festival, not least since many wouldn’t classify it as a documentary at all. Wrapping an imagined (and blithely incoherent) murder mystery around a talking-heads discussion of artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity, this seemingly hybrid exercise offers nothing to assure viewers that any one of its components is more “real” than another. As a feature-length stunt, it has some wit, but falls short on ideas and argument.

Still, the flashy conceptual gimmickry and big-name participation in “About a Hero” ought to be enough to turn distributors’ heads as the film makes its way through the docfest circuit — even if the biggest of those names isn’t really on board. Not in person, anyway. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s statement that “a computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years,” Winiewicz trained an AI model entirely on the venerable filmmaker’s body of work, and has used it both to script a fictional tale of an unexplained death in a German factory town, and to fashion a facsimile of Herzog to narrate it. Named Kaspar (last name Hauser, one presumes), the model is, like much AI creation, close to authentic but eerily askew in all manner of particularities — beginning with its deepfaked mimicry of those distinctively husky Herzog tones, which is scarcely on the level of a party-trick impression.

That’s sort of the point: Hardly an exercise in AI advocacy, “About a Hero” appears to revel in its just-off-ness, posing a challenge to Herzog’s dismissal while proving him…