Frank
Lerner is in prison, but perhaps his mind can set him free. In this case, that
is not a New Age platitude. His fully automated, near future dystopian prison
is forcing him to relive his final day of relative freedom within his own subconscious.
However, he is also looking for clues that would explain his increasingly
desperate situation in Travis Milloy’s Infinity
Chamber
(trailer here),
which opens today in Los Angeles.
After
a long day of drudgery, Lerner was blasted by secret intelligence agents just
as he was ordering java in Gabby’s inviting coffee shop. He next wakes up in a
granite and steel prison cell, with only Howard, his AI minder, for company.
Howard’s primary responsibility is to keep Lerner alive, but he is also
programmed to defend himself if the prisoner gets destructive. Aside from
maintenance requests, he is firewalled from the outside network, but Howard can
still tell there was something dodgy about Lerner’s processing.
After
breakfast, Lerner is zapped back into his head, but he has a reasonable degree
of autonomy to change his actions and investigate his environment. It doesn’t
always make sense that all this information would be imprinted on his
subconscious, but it is such a heady head-trip, we just go with it anyway.
There are elements of the coffee shop Lerner obsesses over, including Gabby,
with whom he starts to carry on an unlikely romantic relationship. With her
help, he will develop an escape plan, which will take on urgency when Lerner starts
to suspect he has been abandoned to die in his cell.
Chamber is a really nifty
science fiction chess game that dexterously exploits the claustrophobic nature
of its limited sets and locations. As one of the smarter dystopian films in
recent years, it is largely character driven, even though two of its three
characters are not, in the strictest sense, human. In terms of motifs, it even
bears some comparison to Nozim Tolahojayev’s animated short film adaptation of
Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.
As
Lerner, Christopher Soren Kelly makes a refreshingly smart and humanistic everyman.
He also forges some really terrific chemistry with Cassandra Clark, who is
surprisingly poignant as Gabby. The circumstances are almost incredible, but
their relationship feels real.