LATENCY - Mark Reviews Movies

Latency, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 13, 2024

As video games become a dominant form of entertainment—both playing them and watching them be played—and the foundation of virtual sporting arenas, movies like Latency will become more frequent. Meanwhile, there's a certain novelty to writer/director James Croke's feature debut, which treats gaming seriously, as a commonplace part of life, and as something that can define a person's sense of identity. The story surrounding that outlook is mostly junk, but it's interesting junk, at least.

The main character, for example, is a professional gamer named Hana (Sasha Luss), whose career has been on a downturn lately. Just from that detail, Croke's screenplay is ahead of the curve of most movies dealing with video games and the culture surrounding them. There was a time when the notion of a professional gamer was either unthinkable or a joke, and later, it was treated as a kind of fantasy or wish-fulfillment. Here, Croke bypasses all of that and presents Hana as a regular person struggling in a particular job market—something ordinary and normal and recognizable.

To make ends barely meet, Hana is a freelance game tester for a major company, and they trust her enough to send her a prototype of a new device. It's worn on the back of the user's head and somehow reads a person's brain waves, allowing the user to become quicker with keyboard and mouse usage, as well as access all sorts of devices remotely with just a thought. It's a neat idea and an unlikely one, one hopes, although technology advances so fast that even the premise of this story might seem amusingly quaint in a matter of years for all anyone knows.

If we accept that such a device is possible, its initial implementation here is tantalizing and a bit frightening. That's the whole point, of course, as Hana discovers she has an entirely unknown edge in an upcoming game tournament that could revitalize her career. However, this also means she's dealing with technology that can read her mind, predict what she's going to do, show her what she wants to see, and, if the later developments of the story are to be perceived in the horrific way they're intended, control what she does.

It's with the movie's shift toward horror and in its portrayal of Hana's loosening grip on reality that the material collapses. The movie becomes like any generic horror story about someone seeing ghosts, a character living somewhere between the real world and the realm of dreams, and providing as many jump-scares as possible. It's inherently frustrating that Croke can envision something as unique as seeing this character's job in the way it does, only for the story to unfold in as routine a way as it does.

The setting is almost exclusively—or actually, depending on how much is just her imagination or the device's creation, is only—Hana's cramped apartment, where she locks herself up and refuses to step out the door. She's agoraphobic, and her only contact with other people and the outside world is talking to them from behind the door. Her only occasional company is Jen (Alexis Ren), who also lives in the building and buys Hana food or anything else she might need.

There's also a little girl who lives in a neighboring apartment and doesn't have any kids her age with whom to play, but to speak more of her might give away too much. It would definitely be a good starting point to discuss how Croke seems to be making up his rules as the story goes.

Anyway, Hana keeps using the device, even though part of its calibration process requires her to inflict pain on herself and she starts imagining things and people inside her apartment. The excuse, perhaps, is that she really wants to win the tournament for prestige and the monetary prize. At a certain point, though, the filmmaker's focus on glowing light on the back of Hana's head just makes us keep wondering why she doesn't take the damn thing off when her apartment starts being haunted by ghosts outside the machine and/or inside her mind.

Basic questions like that strain credulity, and the third act becomes a confounding blend of flashbacks to Hana's childhood, flashes of what might have happened while under the device's control, and visions of muscular monsters and shrieking ghosts and bouncing balls that are meant to represent a psychological breakdown or the effect of the device. None of what Latency ultimately gets at is thoughtful and scary or, on a foundational level, makes much sense.

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