Maybe
there is a rip in the space-time continuum. Perhaps Ana is lost in her own
subconscious. However, one thing is certain: the animal rights activists are
making the situation worse. Frankly, she probably should have done more testing
on animals, because things have been going haywire for her ever since she
served as a guinea pig in her own worm-hole teleportation project. She can’t
trust anyone, not even herself in Keir Burrows’ Anti Matter
(trailer here),
which opens tomorrow in Los Angeles.
What
started with logarithmic gobbledygook quickly and convincingly led to the
creation of a small but stable worm-hole. At that point, Ana had to bring in
some of her Oxford grad student colleagues: Nate, because they have always been
secretly attracted to each other, and Liv, who is obnoxious, but she has the
skills to generate the computing power they need. Thanks to her virus, hundreds
of thousands of computers secretly linked into their distributed network.
Their
tests proceed swimmingly until Microsoft announces they are releasing a patch
to plug their worm, so Ana hastens to become the first human subject while they
still have the computational capacity. Yes, this means we can blame Microsoft
updates for all the trouble that follows. Ana will indeed “phase” just fine,
but things get a little hazy from there. Suddenly, she is incapable of making
long-term memories and whenever she asks Nate and Liv about it, they become shiftily
evasive. To further stoke her paranoia, the animal rights demonstrators outside
the lab have become increasingly militant and their smarmy leader takes a sinister
interest in her. Plus, the authorities have traced the worm to Oxford.
Obviously,
something went wrong during the phase, but what exactly happened is something
slightly new that you haven’t seen a million times before. In fact, Burrows
neatly walks a narrow tight rope, keeping Ana’s perception of reality grounded
enough to imply serious stakes, but sufficiently nightmarish to be greatly
unnerving.
As
Ana, Yaiza Figueroa is pretty spectacular losing her cool and maybe her mind. Tom
Barber-Duffy and Philippa Carson show tremendous flexibility going from benign
to suspicious to we can’t say what at a moment’s notice. Plus, Noah Maxwell
Clarke and James Farrar chew all kinds of scenery as the animal rights Svengali
and the government cyber security investigator.
