Ronan Corrigan, an Irish filmmaker attuned to web culture and the contemporary zeitgeist, makes his feature debut with LifeHack, a film that continues producer Timur Bekmambetov's fascination with crafting entire movies from virtual space. The narrative unfolds across the screens of phones, laptops, and PCs, presenting a collage of digital life.
A Web 2.0 Update of a Cult Classic
Story-wise, LifeHack functions as a modern reinterpretation of Iain Softley's 1990s cult film Hackers. A quartet of heavy-vaping, tech-savvy gamers decide to escalate their nightly online trolling by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire, played by Charlie Creed-Miles, whose personal motto is the crude declaration: 'I'm CEO, c*nt'. Corrigan's secret weapon lies in having already beta-tested his plot points offline; at its core, this is an old-school heist thriller with particularly open coding.
Commitment to an Accelerationist Digital Aesthetic
Corrigan commits more forcefully than his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts relatively new faces who exude the habit of constantly checking their phones. The characters' inherent restlessness and distractibility are established through frantic tab-switching, and their squabbling banter is pumped through the same headset filter one might use for playing Call of Duty. Although the script, co-written by Corrigan with Hope Elliott Kemp, wisely renames a bluff podcaster as 'Joe Brogan', these frames-within-frames closely resemble reality. The film's meme game is strong—if that is any kind of commendation for a motion picture—and there are no ridiculous Google substitutes like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.
A Tender Romance Amid the Digital Chaos
Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between the lead hackers, Kyle (Georgie Farmer) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we encounter the customary limitation of screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement fades, we are left with an ultra-mechanical entertainment, pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its flop era in the wider world, the shelf life of this subgenre is surely diminishing. Corrigan's security-cam footage indicates that the events unfold between 2018 and 2020, making it already a period piece. The film is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will likely make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.
LifeHack is in UK cinemas from 15 May.
