Ronan Corrigan's debut feature 'LifeHack' continues producer Timur Bekmambetov's fascination with crafting entire films from virtual space, collaging the screens of phones, laptops, and PCs. Narratively, it serves as a web 2.0 update of Iain Softley's 1990s cult film 'Hackers': a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers decide to escalate their nightly shitposting by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is 'I'm CEO, cunt'.
A Beta-Tested Plot
Corrigan's secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline, making what we watch at its core an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding. He commits far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phone-checkers, establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs, and pumps the leads' squabbling banter through the same headset filter one might use to play Call of Duty.
Authentic Digital Details
The script, co-written by Corrigan with Hope Elliott Kemp, wisely renames a bluff podcaster as 'Joe Brogan'. These frames-within-frames resemble the real thing: the film's meme game is strong (if that is any commendation for a motion picture), and there are no Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.
A Geeky Romance
Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between hackers-in-chief Kyle (Georgie Farmer) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we experience the customary limitation of these screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement wears off, we are given an ultra-mechanical entertainment, pointing and clicking between spinning wheels.
As social media enters its flop era in the wider world, this subgenre's shelf life is surely diminishing. Corrigan's security-cam footage indicates these events unfold between 2018 and 2020: it is already a period piece. The film is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel. 'LifeHack' is in UK cinemas from 15 May.
