Mark Reviews Movies: LAPSIS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 11, 2021

The finale of Lapsis doesn't quite seem to know where it's going or what point it's trying to make, but that almost seems like the point of writer/director Noah Hutton's narrative feature debut. The film creates a reasonable, eerily authentic world of the future, which looks a lot like ours and has a lot of the same problems. The only difference—one that makes those problems all the more difficult to resolve and also one, from a certain perspective, that seems like a solution to other problems—is a key piece of technology.

It's a MacGuffin of sorts, this newfangled technological breakthrough, in that we don't quite understand how it works. We know what it does in a vague sense, and more importantly, we know that a lot of people want it in some form or another.

It's called "quantum computing," and don't worry, because none of the characters in this story seem to know what it means, what it does, how it works, or why, really, certain people are making such a big deal about it. What we need to know, though, is that it speeds up the process of telecommunications and, hence, of online financial transactions. The economy—in terms of big businesses and banks and stock markets—is booming. Everyone who "matters" wants quantum computing, so quantum computing is the new thing, about to become the new normal.

From the film's first shot of a group of people watching a training video about the wonders and practical implementation of this technology, Hutton puts us in a far more grounded mindset for this story than the technical jargon suggests. This isn't a story about the technology. It's about the ordinary, working-class people who make sure the tech is up and running. There's a potential economic boom for them, too, as long as their financial gains don't get in the way of the corporate bottom line.

One of those eventual on-the-ground workers is Ray (Dean Imperial), a guy whose fashion and attitude suggest a "1970s gangster"—as another character notes and he admits. Ray works for a shady delivery company, and while his boss is setting him up to run the business one day, Ray is in need of an influx of income right now.

His younger half-brother Jamie (Babe Howard) is suffering from a chronic-fatigue illness called "omnia," which, like the name suggests, is basically the opposite of insomnia. Kid brother can barely stay awake. There's a treatment facility for the illness, but it's costly.

Felix (James McDaniel), a man whose business concerns are even shadier than those of Ray's boss, offers Ray a deal. He'll get Ray a coveted cabling medallion, which will allow Ray to immediately start in the business of self-employment. All he has to do is take a weekend hike through the woods, laying connecting cable from one quantum processing cube to another. Felix will take his cut, and Ray can keep the rest. In theory, the only thing standing between Ray and a lot of cash is how far he's willing to walk.

In reality, though, there are many more complications. While Hutton creates a viable physical world for this story, filled with humming cubes and drones that drop more cable and little robots that compete with the human workers, it's the practical, harsh reality of the ways of this world that drives the narrative. While Hutton's intentions may seem allegorical by setting this story in a non-specific future, this is very much a story about now.

It's a world, really, not unlike our own, where people try to achieve independence through contracted, "gig" employment. The pitch from the cabling companies—all of them run by a singular parent corporation—is Ray can make as much money as he wants, simply by working hard, keeping up with deadlines, and sticking to the rules.

He has a one-up on his co-workers/competitors (because the latter is what they really become in a gig like this), because he's using someone else's medallion—a mysterious former cabler known only by his trail name "Lapsis Beeftech." People give him a funny look when they hear the name, coming out of the checkpoints along the trail. Who was "Lapsis," and what did he do to earn such a terrible reputation?

Most of the story involves that mystery. It's also, though, about the absurd and increasingly confining restrictions and challenges set up for cablers like Ray—prescribed rest times, allowances on bathroom breaks, a self-contained economy of points that can be used to purchase food and equipment at franchised shops at campsites along the hike.

Ray gets in deep within multiple conflicting and contradictory interests: the gig, Felix coming for his share of Ray's earnings (Whether or not Ray has them is none of the guy's concern), and a fellow hiker named Anna (Madeline Wise), who teaches Ray a better way to sabotage the robots trying to pass cablers on their routes and believes that the workers should have more power in the cabling business. Ray, a bit of a "free market" guy, isn't convinced too easily, but even he can start to see how much of this looks like the rackets in which he has worked.

At least superficially, that makes the film an allegory, but the world of Lapsis is designed, rationalized, and connected to our contemporary concerns so well that this future feels real, logical, and, most importantly, pertinent. The film's ending may be an enigmatic dead end, but in a way, that feels right in this world, too.

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