Writer/director Noah Hutton’s impressive but uneven debut is an activist futuristic/sci-fi gambit in the stylistic vein of the Brazilian masterpiece Bacurau (2019). Hutton’s film deals with the evils of neoliberal globalization while keeping a very dark tongue-in-cheek sense of humor in satirizing our Uberfied/ Amazonian gig economy and contemplating the dark places that 21st-century disaster capitalism could be headed in the near future.
It’s in this slightly ominous setting that we find working stiff Ray Micelli (Dean Imperial) innocently quitting his job as a baggage handler in favor of what seems to be a physically easier and more lucrative opportunity with a shadowy global agency CABLR. This agency is affiliated with the even more shadowy Quantum company, a Microsoft-like firm out to rule the world using its technological breakthroughs in computer hardware. We’re never sure exactly what workers like Micelli are actually in service of, although evil corporate world domination is probably the general gist of it.
Although Micelli at first sees this job as a route to self-empowerment, he quickly learns that the supervisory situation in this new job is just as oppressive as his old one: except his cable-laying work in the forest is closely monitored by a small robot that is programmed to withhold workers’ earnings if they don’t complete a job quickly enough.
The technocratic dystopia that Hutton vividly imagines here is disturbing mainly in its plausibility—it’s not difficult to imagine any of this corporate malfeasance because it’s already happening in our world, albeit in a less over-the-top form. Yet once Micelli and his coworkers begin to get wind of just how corrupt their employer really is that the film begins to lose its menace, just at the point you’d expect everything to coalesce and build to a dramatic crescendo. Nevertheless, this is an impressive technical and artistic accomplishment for a debut indie. Recommended.