Screenlife movies and producer Timur Bekmambetov go together like wine and cheese. An off-shoot of found footage, films in this category take place entirely on computer and/or phone screens, a formal premise that, in its brief history — since the 2002 experiment “The Collingswood Story” — has evolved in remarkable ways. Bekmambetov has produced horror (“Unfriended”), dramatic thrillers (“Searching”) and even Shakespeare (“R#J”) in this mode, and with the Ronan Corrigan-directed “LifeHack,” the genre now moves dauntlessly into heist movie territory. Your mileage may vary, but for fans of the format, it’s an absolute treat.
Traditionally, heist films involve slick, seasoned professionals moving through space, towards one defined target, like the vault in “Ocean’s 11.” However, the age of cryptocurrency and digital wallets allows the debuting Corrigan to flip these expectations on their head, via a tale of four lonely teenagers with something to prove. There’s a remarkable amount of visual detail involved in “LifeHack,” to the point that a Screenlife premise seems like the only way this story could’ve been conceived. It’s a film featuring realistic hacking (at least, more realistic than Hollywood is accustomed to), one in which information, jokes and memes flood the screen as quickly as they do the lives of Generation Z — only its images are carefully curated by human hands, rather than algorithmically. The result is a genuinely funny and ultimately heart-pounding production, with an executions that feels like a heist itself.
The film pushes the limits of the screens-only concept, given how much of its action unfolds far away from computers. It features security camera footage and FaceTime calls galore, and yet, it tethers itself to the POV of a single character — English slacker and shut-in Kyle (Georgie Farmer) — by presenting all these windows to the world on his computer, with only occasional cutaways to his smartphone. Through a brisk, economical montage featuring younger versions of each character (at this point, what young actor doesn’t have their own decade-old YouTube page to pull from?), the movie quickly establishes its central relationships, between Kyle and his enterprising childhood friend in America, Petey (James Vinh Scholz); his high-energy comrade, the fellow Englishman Sid (Roman Hayeck-Green); and his American crush Alex (Yasmin Finney), a bright-eyed girl with dour secrets.
The quartet largely gathers to play first-person shooter games online, but as a group with various skillsets, they also partake in one of the internet’s favorite new forms of entertainment: finding internet scammers (usually from India) posing as American authorities, and counter-scamming or even outright threatening them in return. This vigilante prank-reversal sets the lay of the land, both in terms of the friend group’s hacking abilities, as well as the Wild West morality of the modern internet, where anything goes as long as you can justify it in your own head.
This leads them to their next big plan: pulling a crypto heist by gathering as much information as they can on tech billionaire and right wing media personality Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles), a thinly-veiled Elon Musk stand-in with more of an edge and more dangerous secrets. Discovering the group’s M.O. is a joy unto itself, beginning with an attack on Don through his social media influencer daughter Lindsey (Jessica Reynolds). The closer the friends come to gathering enough information, the more their confidence skyrockets alongside their rising paranoia and anxiety, making “LifeHack” a nail-biting watch. However, the film also remains firmly rooted in the question of what is motivating them to take on this task. There’s enough conversational downtime between each phase of their plan to establish the details of their home lives, which involve either overbearing or distant parents, subtly framing their harebrained crypto scheme as an act of rousing teenage rebellion.
However, it isn’t long before the movie’s sliding moral scale introduces more complex questions (in addition to existing legal dangers) of whether they should be doing this at all. They often try to justify their motives through an altruistic lens, but the brief glimpses Corrigan and his performers offer us, into each character’s adrenaline rush when things go their way, says otherwise. Before you know it, all the scamming and anti-scamming loops back on itself through surprising turns, backing the friend group into numerous corners and exacerbating the tensions between them.
Climaxing in an intense final act with both real-world and Screenlife dimensions (again, as seen on Kyle’s computer), “LifeHack” finds deft balance between its heist elements and its quiet moments of character. All of these prove immensely entertaining. With a techno soundtrack that keeps thing propulsive, the movie never slows down, even when it takes a breather.
