by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mike Markoff, Garon Grigsby, Chelsea Gilson
Intro:
... has a few bugs in its coding, but there’s something special about its construction that is worth appreciating.
After working as a journeyman camera operator for several decades, the writing and directing debut of Craig Cockerill is an A.I.-centric thriller that manages to stand out in a market where the biggest blockbusters are obsessing over the same material.
Starting out with a ChatGPT prompt about whether humanity or A.I. is more dangerous, the film’s tone concerning artificial intelligence leans somewhat into in-vogue Black Mirror-isms, where A.I. as a replication of human behaviour, gives it the same spectrum as any given human, from friendship to antagonism.
Rather than simply paint it as the villain (a move that has already shown high market potential, as it slots into just about any pre-established antagonistic niche through its ambiguous ubiquity), said A.I., the titular Whisper Breach, is just another character in this tech-savvy thriller all about power and control.
The relationship between WB and former Navy SEAL Kent (Mike Markoff) echoes the buddy dynamic of Upgrade in how symbiotic that relationship is. Markoff and Garon Grigsby as the face of WB show great chemistry throughout, from the initial scepticism that this A.I. is even real to the tantalising possibilities of its usage.
While Kent first experiments with this technology as a means of testing its influence, as well as soothing his emotional wounds (highlighting one of the trickier aspects of modern A.I. usage in a surprisingly tasteful way), the plot soon unravels into a massive web of intrigue and espionage antics leading up to a finale that, in so many ways, from the writing to the hair styling decisions, is emphatically ridiculous.
But the journey getting there is worth it, as the film’s refreshing take on A.I. as a societal reality allows it to comment on areas that, even in a media landscape saturated with such stories, finds different ideas to latch onto. It’s just as much about the use of A.I. in human hands as anything made post-Black Mirror, but without emphasising it as a source of fear or even replacement, its representation as a tool ends up being closer to the truth than a lot of its contemporaries. The spy capering admittedly gets quite convoluted and silly the further it goes, but the film craft combined with compelling performances (the nuances between Grigsby as the A.I. and as its creator are nicely handled) give the central topic an air of excitement and fun. It’s still quite cautionary as far as how we treat such an intelligence, but only as far as it’s a safe bet to treat all intelligences properly, constructed or otherwise. Less “this is a threat to our existence” and more “try not to be a dick”.
Whisper Breach has a few bugs in its coding, but there’s something special about its construction that is worth appreciating. Building on contemporary anxieties, but with a sly sense of humour and clarity about the actual logistics of modern A.I. (to quote WB: “This isn’t the ‘80s, my man.”), its matter-of-factness about artificial intelligence as an everyday tool still latches onto some worser-case scenarios, but not to any defeatist extent. It recognises the potential of the technology beyond the harm it can cause, which not only makes its statements on such things land on much sturdier ground, but also amplifies the very human drama and even comedy at its core.
