Lapsis movie review & film summary (2021)

The filmmaker does a phenomenal job of setting up this world in a natural-seeming way, smuggling mountains of pertinent fact into conversations that pretend to be banal. Notice, for instance, the long scene between Ray and Felix in a neighborhood coffee shop—a Christopher Nolan-level info dump that feels organic because of how it's written and performed: just a couple of guys blabbing over lunch. Once Ray gets into the woods, Hutton repeats this trick in conversations between Ray and other CABLRs (including Madeline Wise's Anna, a labor activist trying to unionize the workers). Because Ray is new to the terrain as well as the job, it makes sense that he'd ask so many questions. 

It's a clever storytelling trick that's perfect for the film as well as for its leading man. Imperial is a 1970s style character actor/lead who has some of the beefy neurotic Everyman energy that Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini used to radiate in their indie film projects. We learn and grow (and grow angrier) with Ray as the extent of the corporation's evil comes into sharper focus, and the actor lets us feel Ray's moral and political awakening rather than constantly indicating it.

The CABLR processes have been fully imagined as well. Hutton draws on news reports about the blandly sinister expansionism of Google (there's an equivalent of Google's absurd-in-retrospect "Don't be evil" mantra) as well as Amazon's exploitation of drivers and warehouse workers (CABLRs carry handheld devices that chirp at them to "challenge your status quo!" and warn them that they're going off-route or that they shouldn't stop because they haven't "earned a rest" yet). Spidery drones soar or hover overhead, watching workers' progress and getting ready to drop replacement cable or fresh droids. I'm guessing that we're five years away from all this stuff being common. Oh, hold on, there's a robot at my door, I'll be right back.

Unfortunately, even as "Lapsis" exceeds your wildest expectations for low-budget sci-fi world building, it doesn't do as much with those details as one might wish. There's a conspiracy wrapped inside of all the enigmatic rushing-around, and when that stuff moves to the center of the story (two-thirds of the way through the film's compact 105-minute running time) a bit of the specialness leaks out of the project. This is partly due to the fact that the main characters finally exercise some agency and begin to seem like more typical studio-level science fiction characters who are on the brink of exposing the truth, sticking it to The Man, effecting real change, etc, even though by that point "Lapsis" has done such an outstanding job of cultivating a Kafka-eque or "Brazil"-like sense of grinding yet hilarious despair that it feels weird and false when we're not in that headspace any longer. It's as if somebody had sculpted a perfect death's head mask, then turned the corners of the mouth up with a Sharpie.

Still: what a debut!  If you made a Venn diagram of influences that included Ken Loach working-class-rage pictures like "Sorry We Missed You" or "I, Daniel Blake," Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You," Alex Cox's "Repo Man," and Mike Judge's "Office Space," "Lapsis" would land smack-dab in the middle. That's a hell of a great spot for a first time feature to be in. No wonder it doesn't know what to do with itself.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46lmKmrmah6rrvVopxmqpWrtqbDjGtna2k%3D