‘April X’ Review: Connor Storrie Anchors a Derivative Sci-Fi Thriller That Never Fully Ignites

It would be generous to claim Connor Storrie sets the screen ablaze in April X, his first leading film role since the series Heated Rivalry elevated his profile. Channeling Harrison Ford’s brooding Blade Runner demeanor—one of several borrowings from that landmark film—Storrie capably carries a dour, straight-faced narrative about human cloning and trafficking in a drab, dystopian future. Yet the material offers him little to engage with, leaving him projecting the air of a professional biding time until a stronger project arrives. That opportunity has since materialized, rendering this film a footnote, though one can hardly fault the distributors for leveraging his sudden fame to secure a theatrical bow and avoid the straight-to-streaming oblivion that seemed its likely destination.

Only Storrie’s most devoted new followers are likely to seek this out. It is hardly a stain on his résumé, but it will fade from memory well before the next season of his breakout series premieres. For writer-director Michel K. Parandi, making his feature debut, April X serves as a more significant calling card, demonstrating resourceful technical craft on a tight budget. His screenplay, co-written with frequent collaborator Jack Coulter, is less assured, stitching together fragments from superior films into a muddy, uninvolving whole. It occupies territory similar to the recent release Hot Spot, Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s comparably scrappy vision of compromised identity in the near future; that film misfired, yet its imaginative eccentricity would have been a welcome injection here.

The year remains unspecified, but the weary brutalist housing blocks of outer Bucharest persist. Though the film never explicitly names its setting, it uses the Romanian capital’s present-day decay—shot on location—as visual shorthand for a world crumbling into concrete ruin. Occasional high-tech drones add futuristic flair to the exteriors, but the narrative’s defining technologies lack sleek, utopian sheen. Cloning occurs in grubby, shadowed labs, while memories and dreams are extracted and downloaded onto surprisingly retro data devices.

In this grim waking nightmare, twins Baxter (Storrie) and April (Lilly Krug) scrape by on questionable work, some veering into outright crime. He traffics black-market organs; she possesses a rare commodity: the ability to dream. In an era where the population has seemingly lost the capacity for nocturnal visions, her lucid, vivid dreams are marketable assets. The concept of selling recorded sensations echoes Strange Days, and it remains one of the script’s more fertile ideas—frustratingly under-explored as the film burrows deeper into a single, glum reality.

The focus stays with Baxter, whose underworld dealings eventually cross a local kingpin, Klein (Șerban Pavlu), landing the siblings in debt they cannot repay. When April vanishes, Baxter’s desperate search begins—only for the narrative to lurch five years forward. The world appears unchanged, save for Baxter’s longer hair and the revelation that April has been replicated into a lineup of identical sex workers. Whether he can locate her consciousness among them, or restore it via her archived dreams, forms the film’s central existential question. Yet the characters lack the warmth or specificity to make the outcome resonate.

Storrie soldiers through with a clenched jaw and steely gaze, but the world never fully materializes. Nathan Haugaard’s glossy widescreen cinematography and Oana Novicov’s distressed production design ensure a polished surface, yet April X lacks the granular texture required for immersion. The plot holds together mechanically, but the particulars of Baxter’s life remain so opaque that he never commands full investment. Parandi’s debut outlines a dystopia more dull than devastating—though perhaps that mundane erosion is the future we should truly fear.

Source link