Joyce Glasser reviews Anon (May 11, 2018) Cert. 15, 100 min.
New Zealand Writer/Director Andrew Niccol is the man to see for high concept scripts. He came up with the story for Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal and the script for Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, but he also directs from his scripts and a modestly budgeted, clever Sci-Fi thriller Gattaca, which he wrote and directed in 1997 launched his international career. Many of his films fall into the Sci-Fi thriller genre (In Time and S1m0ne) and most of which deal with topical issues involving technology and society in thought-provoking ways (Lord of War, Good Kill).
High concept thrillers have to be sustained, of course, and that’s the challenge Niccol faces every time. If In Time and S1m0ne had intriguing premises they were let down by a clunky execution. The same can be said for Anon, a Sci-Fi thriller that fails to thrill. After a promising start, Anon spends almost all of its running time explaining and refining its premise, rather than telling an involving story.
Although set in the not-too-distant-future, aside from an atmospheric 1950’s noir feel, nothing in the infrastructure of a non-descript NYC, the transportation or the clothing suggests we are advanced enough to have created the technology on which the film is based. That technology would have taken some Act of Congress, too, as it means the government has finally prioritised crime prevention and control over privacy.
In Time puts us in a parallel universe or dystopian world where no one can live over 25. After that age, everyone’s arm is fitted with a digital clock that measured your countdown to death, but time is money. If you are cash rich, you could gain time off a starving youth. In Anon everyone’s mind is like an open Facebook page and when you walk down the street the passer-by’s name, age, and occupation appears in a kind of virtual screen around their heads. All you’d need is marital status and sexual preference to flash up to turn the network into a walking dating service.
While this makes solving crime easier, for Detective Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) it takes the challenge out of old fashioned detective work. We see him in a sterile glass walled office, wearily rummaging through a suspect’s or victim’s memories. Without leaving his seat he breaks the news to distraught father Dominic Ray (Jonathan Potts), 50, Insurance Broker that his son has jumped off the edge of a building.
Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried in Anon
When Sal is walking to work one day he notices a young woman, not only because she is attractive, but because the digital display that should be around her head is absent. He dismisses the anomaly as a glitch until, at a staff meeting, it appears there is a rebel without a signature on the grid who has shot one James Cray (Jean-Michel Le Gal) between the eyes. The rebel, referred to as The Girl (Amanda Seyfried) has no footprint and no identity. She is operating off grid in the ether and hacking into people’s memories, editing them or erasing them altogether by a CGI technique used in video editing.
For Sal, the challenge is irresistible. ‘It looks like we’ve got ourselves a whodunit,’ he says and the audience can look forward to that as much as Sal.
Amanda Seyfried in Anon
First, however, the police have to find The Girl. The solution is to do what her clients do: hire her. Naturally Sal is chosen as bait. His identity is changed and he is moved into a swanky bachelor pad with a technologically minded cop (Joe Pingue) hidden next door with a console. It’s not long before Anon replies to Sal’s phoney advertisement. After establishing that he wants her to delete an affair, he quickly asks Anon, ‘how can I find you?’ She replies, ‘I find you’, and we are supposed to be intrigued by the sexual attraction between the two characters. But their conversation is all expository, explaining the rules of this increasingly confusing new cyber-world and how to get around them.
Sal must realise that when he and The Girl have sex (shot in a sombre light, the clichéd sex scene looks like stock footage from countless movies) he is being watched. There’s a long scene in which the male cops sit around and watch The Girl walk around her studio, at one point nude. This voyeurism is all in a day’s work for the cops, but as your mind wanders off grid, you might wonder why the producers had to have the Girl making love to her client at all? Their chemistry is hardly that of love at first sight. The filmmakers might realise there is something a bit creepy in that scenario: in real life Owen is 20 years older than Seyfried, while in the film it is emphasised that Sal is in his forties.
Occasionally we are reminded of the message of the film as Sal and Anon/The Girl debate whether killing the self is the real crime. The government’s suppression of privacy has made it a crime for someone to remain anonymous. You might wonder, too, if a little old lady who has fallen in her home and cannot reach the phone would remain anonymous or be detected and saved.
The plot gets bogged down with the murder of a forger which is attributed to The Girl, but the only real tension occurs when The Girl, who discovers Sal’s true identity, messes with his brain. She cruelly erases the good memories he has of his young son who died in an accident, and when he calls his ex-wife to ask her to send him her memories, she is distraught to realise that hers have been destroyed as well. The Girl puts Sal out of business when she makes it impossible for him to distinguish between the images she is planting and what he is really seeing.
But if The Girl is a serial killer, why doesn’t she just kill Sal? Could she be a freedom fighter framed by the real killer or will she go to any lengths to hide her identity? There is a whodunit here, but it is so clumsily constructed that when the big reveal comes, you’ll either dozing off or beyond caring.
You can watch the film trailer here:
