The Fix

We live in a time of tumultuous change. The natural life support system which we have relied on since our ancestors first dragged themselves out onto land is being torn away from us. Though dire predictions mingle with slick corporate reassurance, nobody really knows where the future will take us. When Kelsey Egan first began developing this film, its masks (like those in her first feature, the magnificent Glasshouse), were purely fictional; we were yet to experience the Covid pandemic. What we did know then and know still more keenly now is that our survival depends on change, but actually undertaking that might be the most frightening thing of all. Here, that need for transformation is both physical and metaphorical but, most importantly, personal, distilled into a form that we can understand.

A story like this needs a central character onto whom we can easily project ourselves. Why not a member of the very class cultivated for that purpose – a model? Ella (Grace Van Dien) is the face of Aethera, a pharmaceutical company whose hot new product is a drug which enables people to breathe the world’s polluted air without being scarred or fatally poisoned as a result. Of course, not everybody can afford it – exclusivity is part of what makes it desirable enough to command a high price – and Ella has only so much for herself. There are times, anyway, when it’s safer to be less visible, less identifiable. Compared to the masses, she leads a charmed life – or at least that’s how it looks on the surface.

Covid has not, ultimately, stopped people from wanting to party, and neither has the catastrophic situation facing the young people of Egan’s world. Ella likes to get wasted and forget about her pain, especially on a day like this, the first anniversary of her mother’s death. After discovering that her boyfriend Tully (Tafara Nyatsanza) has been cheating on her with her best friend Gina (Robyn Rossouw), however, she needs something a little stronger, and when she coincidentally gets her hands on a stash of a brand new drug, she takes the whole lot. The impact of this is immediate, but the physical transformation it occasions takes rather longer, and in the process this troubled young woman, whose whole life depends on maintaining a smooth, blank face, an easily commodified body, is forced to contend with the collapse of her whole world view.

Like Glasshouse, The Fix is packed full of ideas, but its style and pace are very different. Egan spent many years in stunt work and here she gets to explore her potential as an action director, working with some of the world’s top stunt performers to pull off set pieces far beyond what would normally expect from a low budget South African project. Ella’s changing body gives her new abilities, justifying some spectacular feats of running, jumping and climbing which stand out all the more because of their contrast where her former studied stillness.

As she lets go of the habits of strictly disciplined, conscious movement, and as she begins to focus on body over face, Ella transitions from a valued object into a subject with real agency. Her role in the world changes in the process. She ceases to be a passive consumer and discovers that the only way to survive is to take action. She ceases to focus on herself and discovers her interdependency with others.

With Tully falling by the wayside early on, the film is also interesting in the way it centres its emotional arc on the friendship between Ella and Gina. This brings that aforementioned tight, personal focus to themes of cooperation over competition, and makes a space for acknowledging psychological vulnerability and the need for reassurance in the sort of action context where that’s obvious but routinely overlooked. Ella is by no means a willing heroine, but then, none of us chose to be born into difficult, demanding times. As the film increasingly brings Aethera’s senior executive (Daniel Sharman) into play, the need for heroism becomes clearer, and Ella’s path not only morally more straightforward but emotionally easier. This weakens the film in some ways, but by then it has gathered enough momentum that it mostly gets away with it. Of course, a cameo from Clancy Brown never hurts.

The Fix has taken a bit of a battering from some critics and one can see why. its polish in some areas makes it easy to forget that elsewhere it lacks the advantages of a big budget blockbuster. It was shot in a short space of time, under a lot of pressure, sometimes in difficult conditions, so there are times when the performances don’t quite gel or the dialogue doesn’t quite work. That some of the linking scenes towards the end feel formulaic probably wouldn’t bother people as much if it weren’t so inventive elsewhere. It’s its marriage of intellectual engagement with kinetic impact that really makes it work, and that’s not an easy formula to sell at present, but it’s always nice to see a film going its own way.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to go into a film prepared to cut it some slack in respect of its circumstances, and thereby be free to appreciate the good things about it more clearly. If you can do that with The Fix, it will take you on quite a ride.