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They're a family who have long lost the battle to their electronic devices: Dad's (Tomas Engström) addicted to internet porn, mom (Johanna Smitz) spends all hours of the day and night listening to advice from a generic evangelist (James Studdert), the daughter (Noëlle Gutierrez) has replaced her social life with social media, and the son (Kim Lawson-Khalili) is an obsessive gamer on the verge to pro status. There's one golden rule in the household though, no devices at the dining table. However, at their meals together they have remarkably little to tell one another. Thing is, eventually their devices are invaded by something sinister that distorts reality, like the evangelist starts giving bad advice, the children hear their parents talking ill about them in a conversation that never really happened, and then a sex tape of the daughter swamps the internet, even if she never even had had sex. And then dad's account is hacked, and it's adviced that the family give up all their electronic devices in order to clear them of any mal- and spyware, so the family decides on a trip to their cabin in the woods - all device-free. And at first this works out just fine and the family actually seems to grow together at last - until it's discovered that dad smuggled his cellphone in, just for his private pleasure ...

Sure, this film plays with horror tropes and applies them well - but much more than a shocker this is social commentary, even satire at times, on our society's dependency on our electronic devices, and the film drives its point home really well, especially since it's quite as blunt about it and often goes for obvious choices, which works perfectly with the movie's intended slightly artificial looks, which in turn mirrors the "life overtaken by machines" aspect of the film pretty well. To further augment this, all the performances have something off to them, are never quite relatable, which again is totally story-driven. And the result is a pretty unusual, even disturbing, but also highly watchable movie.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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