If
you work for Sony, you probably don’t need a Dutch genre filmmaker to tell you
how scary the internet can be just now. However, if you are a selfie taking,
social network junkie who can hardly put down their smart phones, perhaps you
could use another cautionary tale. Arriving at a zeitgeisty moment, while Sony
and JLaw are still reeling from their respective hackings, a college student
will indeed struggle with digital technology at it most pernicious in Bobby
Boermans’ App (trailer here) which launches today on DVD from RAM Releasing.
Initially,
technology is not all bad for Anna Rijnders. After all, an experimental implant
is keeping her extreme sports dunderhead of a brother alive (hello, foreshadowing).
Then the morning after a party at her ex-boyfriend’s Rijnders wakes up with a
hangover and a nasty piece of scumware installed on her phone. It is called
IRIS and it has an attitude. While it feeds her a few answers during philosophy
class, it also has a wicked sense of initiative. For instance, recording and
posting naked videos is one of its favorite tricks. It also makes calls at
inopportune moments. As we can tell from the prelude, it has already driven
victims to suicide.
Just
buy a new phone, right? Rijnders tries that. It only makes IRIS angry. Frankly,
much of the app’s reign of terror defies logical explanations, but at least it
convincingly shores up Rijnders’ actions and motivations. It is sort of like
the old cult favorite Electric Dreams,
depicting the technology of the day running impossibly amok, but if you buy
into it, the films chug along pretty smoothly.
In
the case of App, Boermans and
screenwriter Robert Arthur Jansen tap into a real and growing paranoia over
handheld gadgets and accidental over-shares. Much has been made of its “second
screen” component, allowing viewers to simultaneously see supplemental scenes
and stills via the real life IRIS app. Fortunately,
the film holds up just fine on one screen, because voluntarily downloading IRIS
just seems like bad karma.
Without
question, App benefits from its lead
performance. Hannah Hoekstra (recently seen in the pretty good Irish horror
film The Canal) is no stupid teenager
or mindless scream queen. She has a smart, dynamic presence that never taxes
the audience’s patience. Obviously, she is not making movies because she is
plain, but she feels relatively real and down-to-earth as Rijnders. While she
interacts with dozens of supporting cast members, Hoekstra is the only one
getting appreciable character development time, but she carries the film rather
well.
