Sasha Luss Is Great In Sci-Fi Thriller With Less Answers Than A Black Mirror Episode

Summary

• Sasha Luss delivers a compelling performance in Latency, holding up the movie’s emotional weight.
• James Croke’s stylish direction creates an immersive atmosphere with impressive visuals.
• Despite these strong points, the movie falls flat with an uninspired and underdeveloped storyline.

As the world of virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology grows and becomes more immersive, it’s frequently found itself at the center of many sci-fi stories. Whether it be the blockbuster escape of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One or the more thought-provoking episodes of Black Mirror, VR and AI can be utilized for a variety of themes and storytelling. With James Croke’s Latency, not only is the exact meaning of the film a mystery, but the lack of thrills is just as baffling.

Led by Sasha Luss, Latency centers on Hana, a professional gamer with acute agoraphobia who has not left her apartment for years, instead working from home and helping with everything from game testing to participating in tournaments. When she’s offered the opportunity to test an experimental device that connects to her brain waves, it seemingly improves her gaming and begins making her life easier. As she begins experiencing strange events, it leads her to question the nature behind the technology.

Sasha Luss Delivers A Surprisingly Compelling Performance

Having first found success in the world of modeling, Luss has steadily been building her film resume over the past few years, having starred in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and Anna, as well as the psychological thriller Shattered. Unlike her prior screen roles, in which the focus was just as much on other characters, Latency is almost entirely driven by Luss’ lead performance, and she proves herself a surprisingly capable actor.

Though there certainly are moments in which her performance feels a bit stilted, namely when it comes to the gaming moments seen in the movie, her performance shows plenty of learning and growth with each new role.

When the movie works to develop Hana and her emotional backstory, Luss captures these layers with compelling grace. Navigating between the heartbreak her character feels over her past — which is rarely explored — and the desire to grow and connect with the outside world, the star nicely taps into every emotion with ease. Though there certainly are moments in which her performance feels a bit stilted, namely when it comes to the gaming moments seen in the movie, her performance shows plenty of learning and growth with each new role.

Croke’s Direction Leads To Some Impressive & Stylish Visuals

In addition to Luss’ strong leading turn, Latency also somewhat benefits from James Croke’s visual approach to the sci-fi thriller. Although the movie only serves as his second directorial effort, the filmmaker displays an impressive grasp on creating an immersive and lived-in atmosphere with Hana’s apartment. The movie’s darker lighting ties nicely into both the environment a gamer would find the best suitable for their lifestyle and someone unprepared to confront the outside world, while the actual production design of the set leads to a few successful jolts.

Croke’s approach to Latency‘s mind-bending thrills also proves a stylish means of keeping us gripped on the increasingly blurry line between tech-induced delusion and reality. Between quite literally blurring shots of ghost-like figures to artful lens choices presenting kaleidoscopic-like images to parallel Hana’s own growing disconnect with the real world, Croke exemplifies some stylish directorial choices that point to a promising future, albeit only if he has the right material to work off of.

Latency Ultimately Suffers From An Uninspired & Unsurprising Story

Despite some of these positive elements, though, Latency can never quite overcome its decidedly bland and underdeveloped story. The nature of the technology that serves as the catalyst of the movie’s plot is ultimately its biggest flaw, as there are too many unanswered questions surrounding it by the time the story comes to a close. Where some movies would at least offer insight as to the device’s creator, goals, or at least set up worldwide catastrophic results in spite of a horror story such as Hana’s, none of these things are made clear; they’re not even alluded to.

Unlike any episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, the movie offers few meaningful messages and even fewer answers about anything that leads up to its anticlimactic ending.

Latency also fails to pose any intriguing thematic questions regarding people’s connection to technology, or any major revelations for Hana to give her some kind of character development. Though the growing reliance on technology holds plenty of opportunities for Hana to break free from her bubble and better embrace the outside world, Croke’s script seems content with delivering reality-questioning thrills rather than offering anything meaningful to keep audiences thinking beyond the movie’s 90-minute runtime, or even within it.

While I could argue the likes of Ready Player One have succeeded without these deeper societal conversations, Latency doesn’t benefit from having a full virtual reality world packed with pop culture Easter eggs. Instead, it takes a more grounded and psychological approach to its potentially unique story, though unlike any episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, the movie offers few meaningful messages and even fewer answers about anything that leads up to its anticlimactic ending.