The latest from producer and screenlife mastermind Timur Bekmambetov, Ronan Corrigan’s LifeHack drapes the Bekmambetov-approved medium of in-screen PC and smartphone captures over the skeleton of a heist film. In doing so, this 2018 period piece, written by Corrigan and Hope Elliott Kemp, also becomes an unlikely study of Gen Z nostalgia, capturing the precise technological and cultural landscape of the internet as experienced by ambitious screen-addicted young people before the 2020s would forever change its tone.
Through a densely constructed series of Discord calls, WhatsApp chats, Steam sessions, and Instagram posts, a crack team of gifted teen outcasts are united by their penchant for technological mischief and semi-principled cybercrime. In a montage showing his evolving internet usage and increasingly creative and complex trolling schemes across a digital timeline of his adolescence, the pimpled, nerd-swaggy Kyle (Georgie Farmer) works his way up from posting obscene messages on Club Penguin to swatting sex site scammers in West Bengal. Along the way, he befriends crafty fellow wiz kids Sid (Roman Hayeck-Green) and Petey (James Scholz), as well as Alex (Yasmin Finney), a beautiful, intelligent, Final Fantasy– and anime-loving camgirl whom Kyle is more than a little eager to impress.
All four teens have strained parental relationships and little to no offline social life. These factors, combined with tech startup culture’s obsession with youthful genius and high-risk, rulebook-shredding ventures, embolden Kyle to push the envelope on bigger and bolder troll jobs, to his friends’ initial hesitation. Noting the career trajectories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Kyle opines that he has only until age 19 to prove himself to the world.
Researching a man his absentee father idolizes, British-American tech oligarch Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles)—an aggressive, juvenile crypto hawker pictured wielding a flamethrower in publicity photos and lighting up a spliff on Joe Brogan—Kyle senses the opportunity of a lifetime. He enlists his crew to scam the billionaire’s spoiled, oversharing daughter, Lindsey (Jessica Reynolds), and raid his untraceable bitcoin wallet for massive sums of digital currency.
LifeHack cleverly utilizes tight plotting and editing, interface-driven storytelling, and a propulsive electronic score by English indie band Two Blinks, I Love You to hype up an uncommonly realistic depiction of cybercrime. The heroes meticulously comb the web, analyze building and IT infrastructures, assume false identities, and contact unsuspecting individuals on the periphery of Heard’s private empire to identify and exploit security weaknesses, maneuvering their way online and on-site to the ultimate prize: high-value information.
The film’s format and subject matter engender a distinctly claustrophobic and paranoid awareness of the power that screens and digital networks have over modern life, reinforced by LifeHack’s setting in a not-so-distant time just before the world of big tech, isolation, and online exposure would take on new levels of social, economic and political salience. In one of many Easter eggs and cheeky world-building details tucked into the background of the film’s busy monitors, Heard’s hacked email inbox contains new unread messages from one “J Epstein.”
The film, though, flinches from some of the darker and headier implications of its script. It prefers to breezily work up to tidy character and plot resolutions rather than truly explore its heroes’ alienation and digital dependency, the relationship between online exposure and mental illness, and the toxic culture of big tech and its adjacency to state power and international crime. Still, LifeHack is consistently intriguing for the conflicting emotions with which it looks back on its chosen moment in tech and time, characterized by cutthroat scamming and cynicism, as well as empowerment and camaraderie for the young and quick-witted.
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