Dir: Ronan Corrigan. With: Georgie Fowler, Yasmin Finney, Jessica Reynolds, Charlie Creed-Miles. 96 mins. Cert: 15
This debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov’s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a Web 2.0 update of Iain Softley’s cult Nineties fave Hackers: a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers who’ve cultivated an online friendship decide to take their nightly shitposting to the next level by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is “I’m CEO, c**t”. Corrigan’s secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline. What we’re watching is at source an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding.
Corrigan does, however, commit far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phonecheckers; he establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs, connecting form to character; and he pumps the leads’ squabbling banter through the same headset-filter one might strap on to play Call of Duty. Though this script – co-written by the director with Hope Elliott Kemp – wisely renames a bluff podcaster Joe Brogan, these frames-within-frames otherwise resemble the real thing: the film’s meme game is strong, if that’s any kind of commendation for a motion picture, and there are none of those Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.
Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov excel as pivotal passwords are sourced, accepted and rejected, then slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between hackers-in-chief Kyle (Georgie Fowler) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we experience the usual limitation of these screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement wears off, we’re faced with an ultra-mechanical entertainment, all pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its flop era, this subgenre’s shelf life is surely diminishing. (Corrigan’s security-cam footage indicates these events unfold between 2018 and 2020: it’s already a period piece.) Efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will likely make older viewers want to unplug and retreat with an 18th century novel.
LifeHack screens in selected Vue cinemas today and Wednesday.
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