Can
Theravada Buddhism save the world? Why not? It is certainly a fount of wisdom.
However, one grad student is more concerned with the advanced meditation skills
it teaches. Controlling one’s thoughts will be one of the gravest challenges of
the Brave New World he helps bring about in screenwriter-director Khalil
Sullins’ Listening (trailer here), which opens
tomorrow in New York.
David
Thorogood and his hound dogging grad school buddy Ryan Cates are on the brink
of a major breakthrough in mental telepathy. They can transfer mental images to
a hard drive, but the decryption rate makes applications impractical thus far.
Much to the married Thorogood’s surprise, Cates’ latest would be conquest,
Jordan Rose, provides the outside perspective they need. Suddenly, they are going
wireless, sending thoughts directly from one noggin to another.
Unfortunately,
the sender does not have much control over what the receiver gets. This becomes
especially awkward when Rose starts destabilizing the team in a two’s-company-three’s-a-crowd
kind of way. To make matters more ominous, the mean old CIA has also been
tracking their progress.
Listening is a frustrating
film, because it starts with a promising premise, but never fully develops it.
The notion ancient Buddhist teachings could undermine dystopian cyberpunk technology
is wildly cool, but Sullins only uses it as an intriguing in media res prologue,
never really exploring it to any meaningful extent. Similarly, casting the CIA
as the villains is a lazy cliché that denigrates the service of hundreds of
agents who gave their lives for our country. Frankly, Sullins constantly takes
a C-student approach, doing just enough to get by. A case in point is the
conspicuously underwhelming “meh” climax.
It
is not wildly helpful either that Thomas Stroppel’s lead performance
essentially consists of varying shades of sullenness. At least Artie Ahr and
Amber Marie Bollinger provide some much needed energy as Cates and Rose,
respectively. The latter also manages to carry off the Natalie Dormer Hunger Games hairstyle, which is
impressive in its way.
