Ronan Corrigan’s first feature is a heist told entirely on screens, and for an hour it is quick, funny and cleverer than its gimmick. Then the windows pile up, the pace stops being a pleasure and we found ourselves watching a progress bar. Good, not more.
Ronan Corrigan’s first feature is a heist film in which nobody leaves their bedroom. Kyle Peters (Georgie Farmer) and three friends, Alex (Yasmin Finney), Sid Daniels (Roman Hayeck-Green) and Petey Le (James Scholz), set out to steal a great deal of cryptocurrency, and the whole thing plays out on their screens: chat windows, video calls, browser tabs, a cursor that hovers before it clicks. This is the screenlife format, which Timur Bekmambetov, one of the producers here, has been pushing since Unfriended and Searching. LifeHack is one of the better examples of it. It is also 97 minutes long and has about 70 minutes of ideas.
The good part is that the hacking looks like work. Corrigan and his co-writer Hope Elliott Kemp treat a break-in as a series of small, dull, dangerous steps, and they get real tension out of a password field and a message that has been read but not answered. The chat windows are full of the jokes these four would actually send each other, and the film knows the difference between a meme that is funny and a meme that is only recognisable. We laughed a good deal in the first half hour, and once at something we felt we probably should not have.
The cast are the reason it holds. Farmer plays Kyle as the one who talks fastest and is least sure, and he is good at letting panic show on a face that is trying to look bored. Finney gives Alex a stillness the format rarely allows; she is often the only face on the screen doing nothing, and that is where the eye goes. The thing between them, conducted almost entirely in typing and deleting, is the film’s best-judged strand, and it is a relief every time it returns. Hayeck-Green and Scholz have less to do and make it count. Charlie Creed-Miles and Jessica Reynolds, as Don and Lindsey Heard, are the adults from outside the bedroom, and we will leave their part in it to the film.
In a screenlife film the edit is the film, and four editors are credited: Sasha Kletsov, Anthony Le, Anton Kudrov and Corrigan himself. For an hour their work is very fine. They know which window to enlarge and when, and they know how long to let a message sit unread before someone types. Ciaron Craig’s job is to make webcams and phone cameras look like webcams and phone cameras, and he does it, which is harder than it sounds. Angela Mulhern’s production design lives inside the desktops, in wallpapers and cluttered downloads folders, and it tells you who these people are faster than dialogue could. The score, by two blinks, i love you, is bright and restless and behaves like another open tab.
Then the trouble starts, and it is physical before it is anything else. Somewhere past the hour we noticed our eyes hurt. The windows had multiplied, the notifications were arriving on top of each other, the pace had not let up since the opening, and the film had begun to mistake more for faster. We were still following the plot. We had stopped enjoying following it, and the plot becomes a set of switchbacks that the screens are now too busy to sell. There is also a version of this film that has something to say about children who have never had an hour offline, and this one glances at it and moves on.
Heist films live on the moment the plan meets the world. Here the world is another screen, so the stakes never quite stop feeling like a game with a high score, and the tagline, “They’re coming for your coin”, tells you the register the film is happiest in. As a debut it is confident and it is disciplined for longer than most. The reviews so far have been kinder than we are, and most of the kindness comes from people who like the format more than we do, which is fair.
Watch it on a laptop, in one sitting, with your phone in another room. It is the one thriller we can think of where the second screen is the film, and it deserves your whole attention for exactly as long as it can hold it.
