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Lapsis

Lapsis is the first feature of fiction from documentary-maker, Noah Hutton (son of Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton) and it's an odd'un. The budget was evidently quite small but Hutton has squeezed every cent out of it with some measure of success. The story involves a low-rent James Gandolfini, Ray (played by Dean Imperial) who is struggling to pay for his brother's Omnia (this reality's ME or Chronis Fatigue Syndrome) treatment. This leads Ray to take some dodgy, 'gig economy' job, cabling through the woods. Said cabling is all to do with Quantum computing and best if we don't try to analyse this too much.

The tension from here on is two-fold. One of those folds is that Ray is given a suspiciously-sourced 'medallion', the device you need to log in at work, kind of like a punch card of old. This medallion used to belong to a person with the trail name (pseudonym for work on the trail) of Lapsis Beeftech, someone who is not roundly admired among colleagues, shall we say. The second fold is that there are mechanized workers, little robotic cabling machines, that can force the human cablers to lose their pay for a course, if they are beaten to the finish. The political undercurrents of this workplace inequity drive the film's outlook and stance. Workers of the world, unite!

There are many promising ideas in Lapsis, some of which hit the mark. The fake empathy on the part of the company rings true, as does the situation of enforced competition between workers - i.e. 'Watch out! That guy wants your biscuit.' A few angles don't quite find the right mood. The pace is a touch slow in parts, the acting veers perilously close to 'indie naturalism', and the ending could have done with a little more verve. But there are enough pros to just outweigh the cons. It's a clever story, set in an ambiguous time period and it deals with some prevailing issues. And Greg from Flight of the Conchords is in it too.

Lapsis opens in Australia on June 3rd.

See also:

It's pretty reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) in parts and also the more current Sorry We Missed You (2019), directed by Ken Loach.

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