Sleek with stylish production and a timely concept, this thriller never quite reaches its potential and would have been much better as an episode of an old Twilight Zone or Black Mirror.
In Latency, Hana (Sasha Luss), is two things: a professional gamer who is so good that companies send her products to test for them and an agoraphobic who is deathly afraid to leave her messy, dimly lit apartment (on which, we are reminded, she owes back rent).
She has one friend (Jen, Aleix Ren) who drops in occasionally with take out food, but mainly Hana is at her computer alone, day and night, zig-zagging her way through digital worlds and games that are still pre-release.
One day, a game company rep calls and asks her to try out a yet to be released AI game. It’s a new one that is so sophisticated, it can be calibrated to her brain…uh oh. With her help, wearing a futuristic headset, the game learns Hana’s fears, memories and peculiarities.
Soon, the already freaked out by agoraphobia young lady loses track of what’s real life and what’s part of this most realistic of games. Is it helping her hone her skills so that she can win a big online tournament coming up—or, like in other man vs. machine movies, is it taking over the store, as it were?
It’s a fine story idea, but it takes way too long to get to the good bits – way too much time showing us the tortured way that Hana has to force herself to open the door for a package delivery, her friend, or a little girl from down the hall, who calls from outside?
When Latency finally gets up some momentum in the second half, the film has watered down some scares and falls short of being a great sci-fi thriller.
I was totally down for the movie in the beginning; the lighting and art production are quite classy for a B-movie, and Luss believably stares at a computer screen, or crawls toward the door. But it feels like an unrealized opportunity and needed more adrenaline jolts to sustain its run time (90 minutes).
But as a half hour episode of an anthology? Wow, it might’ve been very cool.
Latency is available On- Demand for streaming starting July 9th.
