Ray Gunn Review: Brad Bird’s Sci-Fi Noir Takes Aim at Surveillance, AI Fakes and Xenophobia

Seen at AFI FEST 2026.

Verdict: A gorgeous, unapologetically on-the-nose noir about surveillance, AI fakery and who gets to belong. It was good.

• Director: Brad Bird
• Writers: Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins
• Voice cast: Sam Rockwell (Raymond “Ray” Gunn), Scarlett Johansson (Venus Nova), Tom Waits (Eyera), Matt Berry (Francis “Slugsy” Xavier)
• Studio: Skydance Animation, for Netflix
• Runtime: 1 hr 59 min · Rated: PG
• Release: In select theaters from Dec. 4, 2026 (including limited 70mm screenings); on Netflix Dec. 18, 2026

Ray Gunn isn’t just a down-on-his-luck detective. He’s a down-on-his-luck detective whose possessions keep getting repossessed. He’s an ex-cop who got kicked off the force because he took the fall for his captain. He was in love with her. He lost his badge for it and got nothing back.

So when a guy hires Ray (Sam Rockwell) to follow his wife, it’s just another job. Except the wife is Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), the biggest pop star in the world. Think Taylor Swift, but with actually good music. She can really sing and really perform, so I’d put her closer to Christina Aguilera. She’s also an off-the-rails diva who’s always at the party and always chased by the paparazzi.

The last analog detective in a faked world

Ray’s partner, Eyera (Tom Waits), is an alien who can take pictures with his eye. That’s how the two of them gather evidence, and everybody around them thinks it’s hilarious. You guys are still doing analog photography? Metropia is that tech-heavy.

That’s the premise. In this world, news, media and even investigations can be faked because there’s so much technology and AI in everything. It’s a full surveillance state. Targeted ads play inside your house, all the time, through the whole movie. Big Brother is always watching, and the film gets more explicit about that as it goes. Without spoiling anything, the city’s habit of watching everyone ends up helping crack the case, after a very rough morning for Ray.

It goes straight at xenophobia

The film’s other big target is xenophobia. When Eyera gets shot, Ray can’t take him to a human hospital. He has to find an alien one. It’s a small moment that tells you everything about how this city treats the people who aren’t like everyone else, and the movie keeps pressing on it right to the end.

The romance gives the film its heart too. There’s a nightclub, a singer whose voice is magnificent, and a dance that changes things for Ray. I’ll leave it there.

On the nose, on purpose

Ray Gunn takes on xenophobia, racism, a government that spies on its own people, and AI being used for bad, evil stuff. It’s really on the nose about present-day issues, and that’s the point.

It was good. It was good.

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⚠️ Spoilers: the full case

Stop here if you haven’t seen Ray Gunn. Everything below gives away the ending.

Venus isn’t cheating on her husband. The woman in those videos is a body double. Venus’s own studio, the media company she works for, is using the double to wreck her career so the double can take her place.

Then the husband is murdered, and the headlines write themselves: pop star’s husband killed. At the end you find out the company did it. The husband was a bad guy, too. He’d found out Venus’s secret and was about to take it to the news media. The double finds out the same secret, and Venus’s manager kills her to cover it up. Venus gets framed for it.

The company’s endgame was to have Venus arrested and locked away forever. They’d already made a deepfake AI scan of her and her vocals, so they could keep releasing “Venus Nova” music whenever they wanted and collect all the royalties. They’d also found out that the controversy, the idea that she killed her husband, was making her views go up, so they were abusing that.

The secret is that Venus has been an alien the whole time. She’s not ready to tell the world, because the world is so xenophobic and racist that she’s sure her career would be ruined. But she doesn’t want to keep making the bad pop music either. So she puts on a disguise and sings at a local nightclub. Those are the songs she actually wants to write, and her real voice is magnificent and beautiful. That’s where she and Ray have their night: they dance, she kisses him, and they fall for each other right away, because he sees through everything she has to put up with. At one point he tells the disguised singer he thinks Venus hates her own music and thinks it sucks. He doesn’t know he’s talking to her.

Then comes the ending’s fake-out. Venus is running from the cops, and the top of her convertible gets stuck while Ray holds on through the sky. She crash-lands and the car explodes. Everyone thinks she’s dead. The whole world finally accepts her for being an alien, and it’s too late.

Except Ray’s gun, the one he’s carried through the whole movie, is an atomizer. It can suck a person’s atoms in and shoot them back out again. It was broken for most of the film, but it gets fixed. Once the case is over, Ray goes back to his parents’ cabin, a place the movie keeps returning to, and shoots Venus back out of the atomizer. She’s alive. Now she gets to just be herself, an alien, with someone who has always been accepting.