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Lapsis
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| Year: |
2020
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Director: |
Noah Hutton
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| Stars: |
Dean Imperial, Madeline Wise, Babe Howard, Ivory Aquino, Dora Madison, James McDaniel, Frank Wood, Arliss Howard, Violet Adams, Jason Babinsky, Malin Barr, Tim Berne, Kim Blacklock, Alex Breaux, Vernon Byron, Cooper Carrell, Will Conard
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| Genre: |
Science Fiction |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Ray (Dean Imperial) would probably not describe himself as a luddite, but he is suspicious of technology, especially these new quantum computers they have now. Everywhere is quantum, quantum, quantum, and he wants no part of it, but his half-brother Jamie (Babe Howard) is ailing with the unexplained disease known as omnia, and he needs to fund private medical care to help him get through the rest of his life with any degree of success - it's a variation on chronic fatigue syndrome. Therefore when he hears about a job opportunity that could generate those funds, he decides to bite the bullet and sign up...
Not an obvious science fiction movie from an era where that usually meant some kind of action, or even a horror genre inflection or crossover, Lapsis was the fiction debut of Noah Hutton, son of stars Timothy Hutton and Debra Winger, already with documentary work under his belt at this point. Its detractors would claim the film was typical of the Hollywood liberal elite's view of the common, honest working man, but since by this stage those working men, and women, were largely in the thrall of huge tech giants who could buy and sell them with the merest click of a computer program, perhaps it was a shade more savvy than that.
It purported, eventually, to be depicting a revolution against those aforementioned corporations by those who were exploited by them, which took in millions of people - not merely living drones who did the legwork, but those trapped in the services like the medical industry who were unable to get proper treatment, and if they did, they would often be the subject of snake oil salesmen who drained them of their cash for what were basically no better than placebos. Obviously the latter appealed to the nations that did not have a state health service, which was why the Jamie material would make more sense in the United States, but those services existed elsewhere too.
What Ray has to succeed in is an absurdist task where he lays cables cross country, across fields and through woodland, which help out these quantum firms. Now, patently if cables do have to be laid, they are done so underground, or atop poles overground anyway, and simply placing them amid the foliage and vulnerable to all weathers and wildlife would not be an economical method of doing business. Yet while that ties into the vague surrealism of the piece, it also has the audience suspicious the citizens at the lowest rungs of the ladder are merely carrying out jobs that keep them occupied and too exhausted to complain rather than performing anything useful: the entire model could be a sham to keep the unemployment numbers down.
That deviousness the corporation is utilising against folks like Ray is more evident in how it treats those who it believes may be slacking, by fixing the process to make everyone look like they're slacking, simply because human beings need a rest every so often. There are little machines that walk along the routes, and if they pass you before you can check into your next checkpoint, you will lose your income for that job. There was an employee who ensured this was impossible to cheat, and through a mysterious turn of events, Ray appears to have his profile after arranging to get the job with a friend, and indeed he meets an activist (Madeline Wise) who is extremely aware of a conspiracy going on behind the scenes. Not everyone was going to appreciate the ambiguous ending where first it seems one side wins, but then there's a troubling detail they have overlooked or not accounted for, and it did look as if a more provocative, damning conclusion had been edited out, but overall, this was a thoughtful and unusual item of quiet rabble-rousing. Music by Hutton himself.
[Signature Entertainment presents Lapsis on Digital Platforms 5th July 2021.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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