The Fix — Kelsey Egan

There is no perfect formula for a first scene — art is simply too complex to make such generalizations. The pulsing action of Jackie Chan’s Police Story sets impossibly high expectations that look dumbfounding when he outdoes them later; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. would be a lesser movie with almost any other introduction than the playful and energetic dance fight; and, more recently, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast drops viewers in media res into the very heart of the matter. No great filmmaker shares the exact same philosophy on how to deliver a beginning, but the best of them are archaeological in nature: they require effort, luck, and an awareness to stop digging once you find something that looks like what you’re looking for.

The Fix, a new South African sci-fi film that takes place in a world where breathable air is a thing of Earth’s pastime, opens perfectly. The first scene of Kelsey Egan’s (Glasshouse) second feature shares quite a bit with the onset of Bonello’s aforementioned meta-theatrical cinematic epigraph, though things are considerably less weird and ineffable in the former. But both put the main protagonist in the glare of an in-film camera — a commercial for Lea Seydoux in The Beast, a PR shoot for Grace Van Dien (as Ella) in The Fix — that inserts meta-narrative and symbolic functions onto the fake shoots. Ella’s job modeling for the evil company profiting off the climate crisis opens The Fix‘s most meaningful contribution to the sci-fi space by marrying consumerism to the climate crisis while also doing the heavy lifting to define the film’s dystopian premise. She looks great while doing it, and that’s absolutely part of the point.

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