First up was Lapsis
"Lapsis" takes place in a sort of alternate present, which looks a lot like ours and has a lot of the same problems. The only difference is a newfangled technological breakthrough called "quantum computing," and don't worry, because none of the characters in this story seem to know what it means, what it does, how it works, or why certain people are making such a big deal about it. What we need to know is that it speeds up the process of telecommunications and online financial transactions. Major networks are built by threading cables between quantum nodes in isolated areas. The entry point: Queens, New York.
This isn't a story about the technology. It's about the ordinary working-class people who make sure the tech is up and running. There's a payment for them, too, as long as their financial gains don't get in the way of the corporate bottom line. One of those workers is Ray (Dean Imperial), a guy who works for a shady delivery company, and while his boss is setting him up to run the business, Ray is in need of an influx of income. His younger brother Jamie (Babe Howard) is suffering from a chronic-fatigue illness called Omnia, which, like the name suggests, is basically the opposite of Insomnia.
There's a treatment facility for the illness, but it's costly. Felix (James McDaniel), a man whose business concerns are even shadier than those of Ray's boss, offers Ray a deal. He'll get Ray a coveted cabling medallion, which will allow Ray to immediately start in the business of self-employment. All he has to do is take a weekend hike through the woods, laying connecting cable from one quantum processing cube to another. Ray can make as much money as he wants, simply by working hard, keeping up with deadlines, and sticking to the rules, and afterwards, Felix will take his cut.
Cabling is something of a gold rush. Workers will spend days on end trekking through the American wilderness, slapping fiber-optic cables from cube to cube and collecting payment once their lines are complete. The more routes you take, the higher-valued new routes become. It's all kept track of and administered by the medallion, which is a personal data device and GPS. There are also drones that will drop more cable when needed, and little robots that compete with the human workers. The absurd and increasingly confining restrictions include prescribed rest times, allowances on bathroom breaks, and a self-contained economy of points that can be used to purchase food and equipment at franchised shops at campsites along the hike.
Ray is out of his element. He's uncomfortable with technology as it is, but to make matters worse, he's using someone else's medallion. It belonged to a mysterious former cabler known only by his trail name, Lapsis Beeftech. People give Ray a funny look when they hear the name coming out of the checkpoints along the trail. He doesn't exactly look the cabling type, either. He's overweight and balding, and he hikes in button-up shirts and a gold chain, so we can see why the other hikers would be skeptical.
The ways quantum computing could change financial analysis and the world's data infrastructure in general, or how all this cabling facilitates it, is given pretty close to zero time in the film, beyond it suddenly leaving everything on the entire old internet obsolete, and that's fine. That sort of disruption is worth having stories told about it, but it leads to other disruptions closer to the ground. The movie was written and directed by Noah Hutton, who zeroes in on how the big companies have an invisible monopoly and create a gig economy designed to make worker organization almost impossible.
All of this makes "Lapsis" a puzzle film that will leave you wondering about paradoxes, loopholes, loose ends, events without explanation, chronologies that don't seem to fit. Hutton takes care of the problems in an admirably understated way; does cabling work in the wintertime, or is it a seasonal occupation? How do they prevent animals from disturbing the cables or chewing through them? And is it really safe to be near all those chrome cubes in the woods? The story has grand implications, but never gets bigger than the movie can handle, maybe making a couple big steps late, but mostly doing a good job of building while still seeming grounded.
One of the only cablers Ray connects with is Anna (Madeline Wise), a young woman who spends her free time writing about the inequalities levied on the exploited, precariously employed cablers. She also teaches him a better way to sabotage the robots trying to pass cablers on their routes, and believes that the workers should have more power in this business. Ray, a bit of a "free market" guy, isn't convinced too easily, but even he can start to see how much of this looks like the rackets in which he has worked. Take the scene later on where Felix comes for his share of Ray's earnings. Whether or not Ray has them is none of the his concern. It's only a power high.
At least superficially, that makes the film an allegory, but the world of "Lapsis" is designed, rationalized, and connected to our contemporary concerns so well that this future feels real, logical, and, most importantly, pertinent. The film runs out of steam in its closing moments, but regardless, it achieves what it sets out to achieve, and it isn't boring, and it kept me intrigued and involved. As an actor, Dean Imperial creates an engaging and convincing character that I liked and cared about - and believed. He finds just the right note of bewilderment and cleverness. The character is never anything other than a confused man, and yet time and again he saves himself by somehow finding the right thing to say, which is something those robots oughta learn.
Next up was Silk Road
Moviegoers have long been fascinated by career criminals, glorification or not, so it's a surprise that "Silk Road" has the opposite effect when we are introduced to Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind of a dark web drug marketplace. His path to creating the Silk Road, and the string of deaths and the millions in cryptocurrency on the way, became a national crime story. He collected $18 million as commission on more than one million drug deals through the site, and operated under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to "The Princess Bride."
The dreary story of his final defeats is a record of back-stabbing and broken trusts, and although there is a certain poignancy in his final destiny, it is tempered by our knowledge that several lives had to be destroyed by addiction so that Ross and his onetime friends could arrive at their crossroads. That's the thing about Ross. He thinks it's all about him. His life, his story, his success, his fortune, his lost fortune, his good luck, his bad luck. Actually, all he did was operate a toll gate between suppliers and addicts. You wonder, but you never find out, if the reality of those destroyed lives ever occurred to him.
The movie at least has the decency to open up by saying "This is based on a true story, except for the parts that we changed or made up." It's already off-putting the way Ulbricht sees the world. His deep thinking is really not that interesting, but he does back up his words by creating an untraceable website for the purchasing and receiving of various illegal drugs. He is certainly committed to freedom, performing mental gymnastics because his buyers need to know how to mask their IP address and use Bitcoin.
Ross (Nick Robinson) is an aimless idealist who finds an outlet for his radical libertarian philosophy by starting the website. Like a lot of young entrepreneurs, he likes to talk out of his ass, consistently describing Silk Road as a powerful tool that has the intention of "changing the world" and "giving people freedom to do what they want." Ross comes across as an enigma, if only because he presents himself exclusively as a messenger. The message is what matters to him. That approach can be frustrating at times, because the message is so devastating to whatever trust the public has left in Ross that we might want to ensure that he is on the level.
His posturing as a deep thinker attracts some people, and even gets him a girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), who mostly sticks with him despite her moral objections. This approach isn't compatible with the Rolling Stone article the movie is adapted from, and it seems to deviate even further when it comes to the story about the fictionalized DEA agent Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), who has not only been transferred to a desk job in the cyber crimes department, but is entering a whole new world of investigative work he doesn't understand. That’s partly because no one wants him to, as he's a recovering drug user that botched an ongoing investigation. His superiors are more than happy to just let him do nothing before he's due for his pension.
Clarke's performance is the most intriguing in the movie, and when we see his investigative methods, he plays fast and loose. He wants to be part of the ruling circle. So extreme is his mad dog behavior, indeed, that it shades over into humor. The man is incapable of doing nothing. He gets wind of this new sensation about people buying drugs online, but initially can't do anything about it, considering he doesn't even understand how to send emails. Amusingly, he gets in touch with a small-time criminal, Rayford (Darrell Britt-Gibson) who is more than willing to educate, but not without laughing at Rick because he believes that drugs are being sold on YouTube.
"Silk Road" is told through a bewildering tap-dance on the timeline, with lots of subtitles that say things like "Three years earlier" or "Three months later" There are so many of these titles, and the movie's chronology is so shuffled, that they become more frustrating than helpful. The titles of course reflect the version of the facts they introduce, so that a given event might or might not have happened "Three weeks later." Actors separated from chronology have their work cut out for them. A performance can't build if it starts at the end and circles in both directions toward the beginning. Yet Nick Robinson is convincing as Ross Ulbricht, especially when he pinballs from one emotion to another; we see him charming, ugly, self-pitying, paranoid, and above all in need of a fix. The fix, in this case, is a customer or business partner.
It goes without saying that Rick, due to some family reasons that are squeezed in here, becomes corrupt himself leading to some scintillating mind tricks. There is the generational divide between him and Ross, but they are similar. They're both obsessive. They're both completely committed to what they're doing. They're both lying to the people around them and have this burning passion and desire that's a secret at the center of their lives. As a story of the rise and fall of Bowden, it serves. Jason Clarke is a versatile and reliable actor who almost always chooses interesting projects.
The failure is Ross Ulbricht. For all the glory of his success and the pathos of his failure, he never became a person interesting enough to make a movie about. "Silk Road" can have a certain fascination, but not when it's a jumbled glimpse of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people. The movie was written and directed by Tiller Russell, and is his first narrative feature that plays to his strengths of studying true crime. Just last month, he had a documentary released on Netflix, "Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer," which took a much less important criminal and made him an immeasurably more interesting character.
Last up was Shook
Social media influencers are mainly used for decoration, comedy and, all too often, as targets for anger, in stories where the audience is expected to decry their vanity and be entertained by their suffering. Giallo films accomplished this in the 1970s with a hyper-stylized approach, which prevented the subject being taken too seriously. The opening sequence of "Shook" suggests that it's playing that game, too. We see Mia, a makeup influencer with a wealth of followers, attend a red carpet event that is revealed to be staged in a parking lot. Meanwhile, there's a dog killer on the loose, but they only go after one of Mia's fellow influencers, who winds up getting stabbed through the chin with her designer high heel shoe.
Mia (Daisye Tutor) creates makeup videos for a cosmetics brand, and she happens to have the sought-after look of the moment, pretending to be rich on the internet in order to market it. She has a cluster of associates that she calls friends, but they really seem more like cross-marketing opportunists performing in the parallel universe that's sold by online channels and television as Reality. In the aftermath of her colleague's demise, Mia takes to social media to proclaim that it would be a good look for her to do something selfless, so she spends the evening watching her sister's dog and, in the process, misses out on a big livestream with her boyfriend Santi (Octavius J. Johnson) and her friends Lani (Nicola Posener) and Jade (Stephanie Simbari).
Her sister, Nicole (Emily Goss), took care of their mother through the final stages of a neurological disease, and that's tinged with sadness, as Nicole has been diagnosed with the same disease herself. Nicole feels that Mia betrayed them, since she was off gaining more followers and avoiding this reality. Of course, she figures that she can spend the time chatting to her friends online anyway. When the dog disappears, however, the situation starts to look rather different. She gets an unexpected phone call from Kellan (Grant Rosenmeyer), a neighbor who promises to kill her friends (and the pooch) if she doesn't answer his questions and play his games.
The structure of the movie is pretty basic: the stranger calls, Mia searches the house, there's a false scare, and repeat ad nauseam. The house should be, in a way, its own character, since so much of the movie requires her to wander around, discovering new areas that could hide something startling. To a degree, it is. The decorum inside is plush, and the construction has lots of dark hallways. Of course, these will all come into play in the climax, and, as before implied, the setup of these elements pays off to an extent. That is not to imply that the payoff is necessarily good. In fact, it's unspeakably ridiculous.
Jennifer Harrington, who wrote and directed the film, visualizes Mia's digital interactions by projecting her laptop screen on the walls, and by depicting her friends' texts by having them whispering in her ear. Unfortunately, such devices are handled as drearily as the rest of the storytelling, which moves the plot forward through leaden exposition, and which primarily envisions Mia's friends as braying faces in extreme selfie close-ups.
The actual killer's identity isn't that hard to guess, and when their motives are revealed, it actually makes them look worse. The mystery, once it is solved, is both arbitrary and explained at great length. The killer gives a speech justifying his or her actions, which is scant comfort for those already dead. As a courtesy, why not post a notice at the beginning: "The author of a series of murders that will begin this evening would like their victims to know in advance that they have good reasons, which follow..."
"Shook" opens with a good title sequence and goes downhill from there - but slowly, so that all through the first hour there is reason for hope, and only gradually do we realize the movie isn't going to pay off. There are the usual elements here, but they're used as shortcuts. Instead of developing a genuine sense of dread, the movie supposes we'll remember other instances where this stuff was part of an authentic building of atmosphere, and assume this is close enough. It surely isn't, and without that mood of doom, the movie plays out just as silly as its premise sounds.
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