- Directed by Keir Burrows
- Written by Keir Burrows
- Stars Yaiza Figueroa, Philippa Carson, Tom Barber-Duffy
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 49 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVjUYGXKtY0
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This had an interesting start and finish with a stretch in the middle that was a bit too stretched. The acting is fine, and the story is at least interesting, but it starts to crumble a bit when you think deeply about it. It was hit-and-miss overall.
Synopsis
We begin in Oxford, England, where a woman listens to an audio tape of Ana and her mother. We flashback to Ana and her mother, twenty-two years earlier in Florida. We see that someone is holding a gun to the woman’s head. Credits roll.
Ana is now grown up and a student at Oxford. She’s working on electromagnetic pulse tests for her thesis. Most of her experiments don’t do anything until test 7.17. She’s made an electron disappear– success! Nate says she couldn’t have made it disappear, so it must have simply moved somewhere. She repeats it for him, and he says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Nate brings in Liv, a hacker-type who talks about distributed computing and computer worms that will get them all the computer power they could need. With the added power, they can now make larger and larger items “go” somewhere. They use three axes in their machine, but Liv suggests they can use that to calibrate where the items will move to. Boom- it teleports. This could be the biggest discovery of all time!
They build a bigger machine. They try it on a caterpillar, and it transports just fine. Then, they use Liv’s grandmother’s cat. As Ana finds a gun in Grandma’s office, Nate asks her out. Liv reports that Microsoft has issued a patch to break her worm; they only have time for one more big test. They draw straws, and Ana gets into the machine. Ana vanishes, and the screaming starts.
Ana goes back to the lab and is stopped by the animal testing opponents outside. She says she feels fine. They’ve lost all their computer capacity, but they do have some computer models saved until they can get major funding for a supercomputer. “Everything went OK, right?” Nate is evasive. Liv asks about the tests, and Ana doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about.
Ana calls her mother about packing up her stuff to send to her. She goes back home to find her apartment is a mess. There’s someone in her room wearing a monkey mask; she tackles him, and they both fall out the window. Ana chases the guy down the street, but she ends up falling down some stairs and getting knocked out. Her laptop, credit card, and passport were both stolen.
Ana tells Nate that she doesn’t remember anything after the experiment. What happened? Nate tells her not to worry, and Liv backs him up. Liv says the cyberterrorism agency has tracked down the source of her worm to the university and may start asking questions. Ana’s not even sure how many days have passed since the experiment; she’s forgetting things, and it’s clear that Nate and Liv are hiding something.
When she leaves the building, she sees several of the animal rights activists wearing monkey masks like she saw before. The leader of the group says Ana needs to do the “right thing” and then walks off.
Later that night, Ana goes back to the lab and finds a cable leading to a strange device. Nate calls and wants to do dinner tomorrow night. He tells her to write it down so that she doesn’t forget. She admits that there’s something wrong with her memory, and he blames getting hit by the mugger. He says she has an MRI appointment in a couple of weeks, but she doesn’t know anything about that. He says she’s told him all this before and that she needs to stop the investigation.
The Vice Chancellor of the university gathers everyone together. The Cyber cops have traced the worm to this very building. Mr. Stovington is from GCHCQ, and he’s running the investigation.
Ana wonders if she went through the teleporter, but her soul didn’t go with her. Liv and Nate are evasive. She calls her mother, who asks her for the password. “Is that really you? You said I shouldn’t trust you without the password.” Ana has no idea what password she’s talking about. We see that Ana’s mother’s house is completely empty.
Ana starts doing library research about brain damage, memory, and the mind. She wonders if human memories have mass. Memory is electricity, and electricity is just electrons, and electrons have mass, so yeah, maybe.
There’s a break-in at the lab, and everyone thinks it was one of the protestors. Ana accuses Nate and Liv of doing something to her, and she thinks they’re trying to steal her project. She wants a maintenance man to open the door to the storage room, but he says he already gave her the key, so he can’t.
The police and Mr. Stovington follow her home for some questions. He knows she’s behind the worm. She hallucinated him and the sergeant as monkey-mask men. She refuses to say anything but tells him to question the others.
The mob of protestors is getting larger and larger. They confront her about the mice and the cat. They all start chanting, “Shut her down!”
Ana goes back to Liv’s grandma’s house and steals the gun. She then goes to Nate’s house, breaks in, and searches the place. She finds the camcorder from the original experiment and watches it. The teleport went off exactly as planned, but there was some kind of instability. She watches again in slow motion and sees that she was in two places at the same time for an instant.
Nate arrives, and she pulls the gun out. She shoots him in the neck and runs outside. She tells Stovington that she’s lost her soul, but then Liv pulls her into the lab. Nate’s at the lab as well; he’s not dead, just wounded.
Nate explains that the wormhole was open for too long. The gravity field distorted the readings. They had to figure out a way to shut it down faster, so she went through a second time. Nate shows her the rest of the tape. The second time through the wormhole, the machine cut out, and there were two of her. “You’re the light that got left behind.” She’s photonic, made of light. She’s not real, which is why she’s not eating or drinking or making new memories.
The storage room door opens, and the real Ana walks out. Real-Ana admits to being the person in the monkey mask.
Light-Ana’s mother calls on the phone, and they talk about things that she remembers. Her mother sent her an audio tape of them playing the piano when she was little; she plays it. This was the opening scene of the film. The real Ana takes the gun. Nate tells her that they’ve explained all this to her several times in the past, and it never went well, so they just let her wander around in confusion.
Light-Ana gets back into the machine as the real one watches. They activate the machine, and Light-Ana disappears completely.
Ana, Nate, and Liv discuss whether or not to proceed with their experiments. Ana tells Liv to hack the system and place the blame for the worm on the animal rights people.
Commentary
The early part, with the experiments, is interesting, but after Ana goes through the experiment, we see that something is off, but it takes entirely too long to go anywhere with that. The second half-hour feels incredibly slow. The resolution at the end is interesting and unique, but don’t think too hard about it.
You know, it’s entirely possible to write notes with specific details that are more than single words. That would have cleared up a lot of Ana’s confusion. Also, I have never seen a movie where the animal rights people aren’t portrayed as lunatics and weirdos.
Why did they lock the real Ana in the closet and let the light-Ana wander around out in the real world? This makes no sense. Also, why weren’t there two cats?
We liked it overall, but it really drags in the middle, and you don’t want to think too hard about any of it.