A young psychology student is drawn into the dark and fearful world of a diabolic and mysterious App that starts to terrorize her, distributing compromising photographs, videos and text messages about herself and delves deeper and deeper into her personal life, flawlessly exposing all of her deepest secrets.
01 May App (2013)
Vision
This promises two things.
One is a lightweight system to connect an App with a movie. You download the free App and launch it. It listens to the film and synchronises some images and a little video from time to time. This is a fantastic idea, but in this case the experience wasn’t expanded. The main effect is that the movie is purportedly about an app with the same name that takes over your phone and life. This is potentially very spooky, like having Ringu in your VHS player.
The other promise is a new twist on the charmed evil object merged with the trope of an AI system capable of gathering from anywhere and reaching everywhere. We’ve seen too many from the AI side already, many of them so uninformed they cannot register. They may as well use genies.
That’s something of what goes on here. In fact we have three horror notions merged.
The app in some instances has to be placed on the phone but in others not. It seems to be connected to everything that is online, but the appearance and behaviour is unsophisticated.
It also is magical, turning on a radio that it knows will bounce into a pool; driving a truck into a car. Making a phone explode. Reading minds.
We also have the technologist conspirators, a supposedly bright student and a medical doctor who have placed this app here and there and also control it to some extent. There is no discernible logic to what we see, though.
A typical high tech NSA conspiracy plot can use these without much question: the organisation is evil and the tech is often out of control. Simple.
Some deaths occur to keep the app undisclosed. The app appears to spy on the student’s old girlfriends. It is used to try to control prosthetics for the heroine’s crippled brother…
One episode seems purely evil, revealing a completely unrelated gay encounter between student and professor. You’ve got to be pretty soft in the head to not let these key matters get in the way.
No redeeming content, despite the downloadable second screen experience.
Posted in 2015
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
No Comments