*** outta *****

3 outta 5

Writer/director Andrew Niccol has some impressive credits under his belt, having written The Truman Show and written and directed the 90s sci-fi classic Gattaca and the drone strike meditation Good Kill.  His latest film, the Netflix exclusive Anon, leans back into the sci-fi noir thriller vibe of Gattaca with well-worn detective elements like a dark femme fatale, bodies piling up, and a hard drinking mopey gumshoe hero.  This is sort of about invasion of privacy via constantly plugged in interconnecting digital living and voyeurism. Also the movie has a central visual gimmick seeing from people’s point of view that is cool.  Oddly with all of those big ideas it’s still really slow but noir detective stories generally take their time. 

In the future, everyone is plugged into a constant data upload called the Eye which they can record every moment of their lives. The Eye instantly identifies people and also purchases items, unlocks doors, calls their friends and is the primary way people live their lives.   This makes solving crimes a bit dull for Detective Sal (Clive Owen) since he can just look through people’s recordings.  Things get twisted when a murder doesn’t leave any evidence as the victim’s feed has been hacked showing only the point of view of the murderer.  Under orders from his boss, Gattis (Colm Feore), Sal goes undercover to find the murderer.  At the top of his list of suspects is a girl (Amanda Seyfried) who registers simply as an “Unknown-Error”.  The girl does the tricky job of rewriting and erasing people’s recordings but when Sal hires her, things start to go very wrong as he can’t even trust the world unfolding in front of his eyes. 

There are a lot of details to the plugged in point of view of the Eye which would have probably looked better on a theatrical screen so it’s ironic that since this is a Netflix release a lot of viewers will see this on their iPads or phones.  There’s visual gimmickry of flopping between the point of view of the camera and the point of view of the person, which is done actually by swapping aspect ratios from widescreen for the POV of the movie and full-screen for the POV of the person.  It’s a neat trick as usually films are in one aspect ratio throughout but it also may just make some viewers think their TV is broken. 

The POV of the characters has an incredible amount of detail, information about people and products, calls and text messages popping up, and even background music playing in their heads.  It seems like a convenient yet incredibly menacing way to live. The movie shows this POV quite a lot and there are more than a few empty pauses as characters boot up data with a silent close up of them staring blankly off into space.  This sort of reaches an apex of silliness when the cops end up hacking the girl’s feed and they sort of just sit there and stare while she wanders slowly around her apartment.  It’s supposed to be voyeuristic and creepy, and it is, but it doesn’t exactly do wonders for the movie’s pacing.  But other times slowness does work well as the murders shown from the point of view of the killer are effectively disturbing with a characters death simply concluding with “End of File”. 

As the object of investigation, Seyfried does a great job as the noir femme fatale, playing things alluring, mysterious, potentially deadly with a shadowy past, and sarcastic.  It is a bit of a checklist of mystery woman clichés but she makes it compelling.  She is just off kilter enough that it’s plausible she could be a cold hearted killer. The girl says she doesn’t have anything to hide, instead there’s nothing that she wants people to see which makes her either a rebel or crazy.  It is a bit of a shame in the climax the script tries to turn her into a damsel in distress, which doesn’t fit with the calm, capable mastermind she’s portrayed as. 

Owen plays a hard drinking, moping detective haunted by his past, which is pretty much the standard package that movie detectives come in.   Having lost his kid all he has are his memories and digital recordings.  When the killer hijacks Sal’s technology, he has to endure the torture of reliving his kid’s death over and over with all of the happy recordings being erased.  Owen also gets some exciting scenes where his character is being hacked and some of the movie’s best visuals are when things from his point of view start to go haywire. As his boss, Feore sort of is there to bounce exposition off of and at one point he tells Sal to hand in his gun which is required in cop dramas. Still, Feore manages to make his line deliveries feel appropriately grizzled. 

Anon has a lot of ideas and a really interesting performance by the lead actress. It looks neat although it seems a wee bit too much in love with its central stylistic quirk and things can be draggy and cliché ridden. But as far as random original new movies on Netflix go, it’s certainly better than most.