michaelandwes14’s review published on Letterboxd:
It’s a very hard movie to describe , which is a good thing and bad thing, because what’s good about it exists more powerfully in images than in dialogue. But there is a clear through-line here. The story opens in the long aftermath of a war. The fallout implies what came before. There is an attack on a university, the squashing of dissident opinion and public intellectuals, heightened police surveillance, and there are more boots on the necks of laborers than ever before. All of this is transpired, in Neptune Frost, through a confluence of strange present-tense scenes, and wandering tales, memories, breaks in the neat sutures of the narrative — all of which pull the characters toward some other reality, some techno-resistant destiny. What is bad about it is that it was very hard for me to get into it, not much of a sci fi type musical person. I had to watch it a couple of times to even get the point of it, but that’s my opinion. If it was my type of movie I can say it had pretty cool features.
Instead of harvesting labor and natural resources, these characters — led by the combination of Neptune and Matalusa — learn to work toward harvesting their own power, which arrives in disruptive feats of being creative, not unlike that of the movie itself. Neptune Frost was filmed in e-waste sites in Burundi and has a descent sense of reality for that very reason. The music is alive and seemed very realistic as if you were actually there. While these elements never fully cohere to form a discernible narrative in “Neptune Frost,” there is fun to be had in surrendering to the fluidity of its imagination