LAPSIS. Starring: Dean Imperial, Madeline Wise, Babe Howard, and James McDaniel. Also, Ivory Aquino. Directed by Noah Hutton. Rated PG (Mild themes and coarse language). 108 min.
Ray Tincelli (Imperial) doesn’t have a lot of people around to give him support. He has a young, half-brother, Jamie (Howard), who suffers from a serious illness, and treatment for him is expensive. Ray is desperate to find a well-paid job that earns much more than his current job as an airport delivery man. He eventually finds a position as a contractor for a corporation that lays cables for future generations of investors, who want to take advantage of all that “quantum computing” can deliver. Ray’s company claims to be the key provider of quantum broadband that can accelerate stock trading, faster than any other alternative.
Ray signs himself up to work for a free-market cabling enterprise. Cabling is a relatively easy job, but the hired labourers find themselves working in competition with mechanical robots. Ray walks through leafy forests, putting cables on the ground as he goes. He lays miles of fibre-optic lines on a predesigned route to link up with huge Quantum Computing Conduits, that are metal cubes linked together and tracked by mechanical robots. The metal cubes are giant terminals that facilitate stock trading. Ray’s cabling route takes him through a community of campers, and he finds that everyone is part of the same business enterprise, and that the cabling company is undercutting the campers’ earnings. He is befriended by Anna (Wise), a savvy worker, who wants to pressure the company to offer fairer treatment to the people it employs.
This is a film that takes futuristic sci-fi, and explores it provocatively in a thoroughly comedy-absurdist style. In Ray’s company, shareholders are getting rich at the expense of labourers forced to endure low-standard living conditions in the name of technological progress. The cables are designed to facilitate high speed stock trading, and robot cablers are used to threaten human labourers, to pressure them to perform more productively for the company.
Ray acquires a medallion credential to start cabling, and he obtains it illicitly from Felix (McDaniel), a character of ill-repute. The medallion once belonged to someone under the name “Lapsis Beeftech” and medallions are tracking devices that help the company control its workers. Human cablers are hostile when Ray mentions “Lapsis”, because the false name he is using reminds workers of the company’s tactics to pressure and harass them. Everyone, except Ray, knows his medallion belonged to a mistrusted cabler, who has since disappeared.
The film’s scripting is highly original. The impact of its satire is reinforced by visual shots of technology, that is only ever communicated partially. The film is satirical largely by implication; it moves at a leisurely pace, lampooning high tech-advancement all along the way. However, the movie is as much about greedy corporations, as it is about technology being mis-used or mis-directed, and the film argues its social case in a highly inventive way. The film is not polemical about the advances of high-tech quantum technology; rather, it concentrates on how technology’s alleged benefits are marketed, promoted, and misleadingly sold. The exploitation of workers is a key issue. The film communicates explicitly that profit is precarious in an economy in which working members are disadvantaged, de-valued, or victimised, by the company they work for.
This is a smart, low-budget film that plausibly projects a disturbing vision of what could happen in the future. Ray’s company operates to ensure that high-tech advancements must stay separate from any “human issues” that might threaten its core concerns. Dean Imperial shows the right amount of naivety and ignorance as Ray, and Madeleine Wise, as Anna, excels in her dry asides. This is a darkly funny, innovatively directed movie that promotes thought and laughter on many fronts. It satirises technology, while raising major social problems. The last enigmatic scene in the film raises a delicious question about who (or what) has the final upper-hand.
Maslow Entertainment
Released 3 June
Peter W Sheehan is an Associate of Jesuit Media