Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Dean Imperial, Babe Howard, Madeline Wise, Ivory Aquino, Arliss Howard
Intro:
A power-to-the-worker manifesto, a plain-faced dystopian satire, and masterclass in using minimal budget for maximum effect.
Sometimes, the more mundane a film is, the more surreal it becomes. The feature debut of documentarian Noah Hutton (Crude Independence, In Silico) takes place in an alternate present where Ray (Dean Imperial) attempts to cover his kid brother Jamie’s (Babe Howard) medical bills by taking the job of a cabler, running miles of cable through a forest to connect newfangled Quantum computers.
This is science fiction in the same way as Shane Carruth’s Primer or the more grounded episodes of Black Mirror, in that the technology is ultimately a means to look deeper into human consciousness than anything mechanical. Over the course of many conversations (some of which enter Black Christmas remake levels of on-the-nose), Hutton and his collection of capable actors dish out plenty of snipes about the Amazon/Uber/general gig economy business model, how that extends into other areas like healthcare, even a sly jab at multi-level marketing in how the ‘cabler’ profession is structured.
Snipes land more times than not, using a lot of the flying-over-heads technical detail not for world-building, but just to further how ridiculous this scenario is as something ‘normal’; where automation putting human jobs at risk only further highlights how dehumanising the work is to begin with. Cabler technology regularly tells employees to “challenge your status quo”, and Ray tries to argue that working hardest means reaping the most rewards, which ignores that the advantage is with those who set the pace for everyone else.
As polished as Lapsis is for such a low budget feature, there is a high possibility that it will rub some audiences the wrong way. Hutton treats narrative in a similar way that Yorgos Lanthimos does – the plot will only make sense if you pay attention to every small detail. The smaller the detail, the more important it will become later. There’s also the finale to account for, which makes Imperial’s Tony-Soprano-esque visage seem like deliberate foreshadowing, not to mention being far less of an exclamation point than the production frames it to be.
All the same, the kind of blue-collar sci-fi that Lapsis represents is in such short supply, and yet in such conversely high relevance to the modern era, that even its misgivings feel minor compared to how much it gets right. A power-to-the-worker manifesto, a plain-faced dystopian satire, and masterclass in using minimal budget for maximum effect.
