‘Aire, Just Breathe’ Review: Dystopian Sci-Fi Rooted in Fears of AI and Human Extinction Feels All Too Familiar

In 2024, there is no shortage of possible imagined dystopian futures. Not just because there’s an ever-growing canon of films that dream up humanity’s worst-case scenarios but because news about climate disasters, headlines about dwindling natural resources and well-founded fears about the encroaching power of AI dominate our day-to-day lives. That’s perhaps what makes Leticia Tonos’s “Aire, Just Breathe” both incredibly timely and decidedly familiar. The Dominican sci-fi film is an austere vision of a ravaged future that, while visually striking, remains much too hollow, cerebral, even, to fully pack an emotional punch.

The year is 2147 and Tania (Sophie Gaëlle) has learned to live on her own. Every day she wakes and cares for what scant plants she can nurture in the underground bunker she’s come to call home. Despite not having had contact with any other humans in quite some time (she may be the sole survivor of what we’re told was the Great Chemical War which drove humanity to near-extinction), Tania is committed to trying to help life find a way. Along with her trusted AI, cheekily named Vida aka “life” (voiced by Paz Vega), Tania is dabbling in some reproductive experiments that may help her bear a child. There’s boredom and weariness to her everyday chores, her hope laced now with the sheer mundanity of her everyday solitary life. Only Vida gives her world any kind of texture.

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Lest you think Vida is nothing more than a voice, that artificial intelligence figure is presented visually as a luminous circle (if you’re thinking of HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you’re not far off) on the forehead of a large-scale sculpture of a face. There’s a primitivism married to her futurism: Indeed, she even refuses to call herself AI, referring to herself instead as a “creative intelligence system” who’s been learning not just from files and written sources but from Tania’s own behaviors — for years and years now. So much so that the two seem to operate as one, driven by their ambition to keep Tania alive and to make her into a mother figure for the humanity that’s to come.

Their carefully organized world comes to a standstill when a mysterious man called Azarias (Jalsen Santana) shows up at the bunker. Is he friend or is he foe? Is he a harbinger of hope or an unwelcome death knell? Will he help carve out a better future or is he there to break free from what’s long past? The answers to these questions unfold methodically as Tonos turns “Aire, Just Breathe” into a three-hander that’s anchored by the eternal query of what it means to survive — and what we may need to do so.

Where Gaëlle’s Tania is tightly wound (almost robotic) in her demeanor, Santana’s Azarias is looser, warmer. The schematic way in which they trace the choice between trusting technology or embracing nature’s siren song dominates their interactions. As Vida begins operating from Tania’s stated directive that the two needn’t need anyone else, their future (and that of humanity) becomes ever more imperiled — all while harsh winds, hostile storms and a noxious atmosphere up above make their world ever more inhospitable to them both.

With a brutalist production design that drives home the unfeeling environment in which Tania has ensconced herself as a way to survive, “Aire, Just Breathe” is a desolate vision of the future, one where color has been drained. What little greenery she grows in her quaint greenhouse looks feeble against the imposing, cavernous spaces she walks in and out of on any given day.

There’s an unfeeling aesthetic to film and space alike. Azarias’s arrival, and his conviction that there may well be a future outside — out at sea, perhaps — feels like an affront to what Tania and Vida have been building, to their very co-existence. He’s dirtied and embodied in a way that Tania hasn’t or can’t will herself to be. Aesthetically, this sci-fi film may borrow from well-known iconic imagery (not just Kubrick’s AI, but the likes of “Dune,” “Blade Runner” and “Interstellar”). But it reworks some of their themes toward urgent concerns that start feeling less like dystopian nightmares and more like present-day emergencies.

Tonos has created a truly barren world. Furious rainstorms play backdrop to thrilling sequences where you truly worry for the survival of the film’s characters. Where the very air around Tania and Azarias may spell doom for them both. It’s why maintaining Vida online and in charge of the tech that filters the air in the bunker becomes a key concern throughout the film. As novel as it may seem within the canon of Caribbean films, “Aire, Just Breathe” remains all too consigned to well-worn tropes — especially when it eventually careens toward a rather expected and somewhat dull third act. Tonos’ beautifully art-directed film is most interesting and insightful as an indictment of tech-assisted climate disasters, a message as trite as it is, perhaps even still in 2024, quite necessary.