Our story opens five minutes into the future, where young-ish Josh (Jack Quaid) and his beautiful girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are driving up to a very secluded “cabin” in the woods — more like a rich guy’s personal resort — for a weekend with his friends, one of whom is dating the cabin’s vaguely sinister Russian owner Sergey (Rupert Friend, hamming it up with the accent). After a fun but occasionally awkward night of drinking and dancing with his pals, Josh and Iris HAD planned on going out to the lake together the next morning, but he says he’s got a hangover and sends her on ahead. Well, when she gets there Sergey first subtly and then FORCEFULLY tries to have his way with her. Iris defends herself, and … well, that lights the fuse that blows up the whole weekend.
Drew Hancock’s darkly amusing thriller wasn’t pinging on my radar until the later ads spoiled the film’s first twist, which, I’m gonna suggest you stop reading at the end of this paragraph if you want to go in completely cold, which most viewers do seem to recommend, but if you’ve been watching any ad-supported video online you probably HAVE seen what I’m talking about. I’m just going to say, even knowing that, there were still surprises aplenty, and I loved the whole thing from start to finish — the whole film lives or dies on Quaid and Thatcher’s chemistry, from cute couple to, err, how things end — and the whole arc feels unsettlingly real … but ultimately satisfying from where I’m sitting. It’s a clever, zippy, well-paced and well put-together story of a half-thought-out plan full of ill intent burning everyone’s lives down, with a few smart things to say about the state of tech and the state of aggrieved young white dudes in the 21st century.
As for me getting MY butt into the seat, the first big swerve is that Iris isn’t REALLY Josh’s girlfriend: she’s a companion robot (and all the true-to-life details we get about that arrangement, like Josh scrolling through and not really reading the Terms of Service and the fact that he didn’t even buy her, he’s renting — he clearly couldn’t AFFORD to buy, and the way tech companies make it hard even if you have the money, maybe he couldn’t anyway? — are a nice touch). And the effed up thing is, Sergey knew, which is why he figured he could get away with — and Iris didn’t, which is (partly) why she completely freaked out. But it’s not an “evil” killer robot movie — far from it, this is a movie about something being kind of rotten about all these damned people around her, including Josh. I know Quaid’s big breakout role was in Amazon’s THE BOYS, but I mostly know him from STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS (or more accurately, a couple of episodes of that show and the STRANGE NEW WORLDS crossover episode) where he oozes with affable average white everyman charm. It looks like that action movie he’s got coming up, NOVOCAINE, where he can’t feel pain and uses that to rescue a girl he’s just started dating, is going to put that to good straightforward use; here, it’s used to … let’s say DIFFERENT ends. He’s kind of shitty in a very real and familiar entitled way. No, Iris is the heroine — this is HER story, as her opening narration (used for the last trailer) makes clear. It’s EX MACHINA after the product rollout; it’s BLADE RUNNER if the movie from the first scene said, screw Deckard — this is Roy Batty’s story. You know how these ridiculous tech companies are all obsessed with being first to create AGI — “Artificial General Intelligence,” AI that literally reproduces how people think? What they’re trying to do is be the first to basically make a up a person, a thing that operates very much like you or I, and then chain them to a desk (or in poor Iris’s case, to Josh’s bed) and make them work forever. And what this movie says is, hey, that’s kind of fucked up — if you were that thing chained to that desk, and if you WERE actually like us, you’d want out, right? And after what EXACTLY happens to Iris, yeah, she wants out. Thatcher is so damn good playing the sweetness, the incredulity and outrage, all those emotions written all over the face of a person whose programming forbids her from lying. She makes the goddamn movie sing. Like I said, I loved this, and the disc will inevitably join my collection of Very Good Movies Where The Poor Girl Deals With Her Unreality, And Also, Boy Isn’t Masculinity Kind of Fucked Up along with RUBY SPARKS and BARBIE.