Anon

Arriv­ing in the wake of the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca data scan­dal, Anon is a time­ly sur­veil­lance thriller from writer/​director Andrew Nic­col. It’s an intrigu­ing future who­dun­nit from a film­mak­er who has forged a career by explor­ing the uncer­tain eth­i­cal ter­rain where hi-tech meets low morals.

In the under­rat­ed Gat­ta­ca, genet­ic engi­neer­ing is key in a sto­ry of hid­den iden­ti­ty and mur­der; in The Tru­man Show, a man’s entire life is being broad­cast to the world as a pop­u­lar TV show with­out his knowl­edge or con­sent; and in Good Kill, a drone pilot safe­ly ensconced in a Las Vegas desert cab­in ques­tions his ethics while he remote­ly drops bombs in Afghanistan.

Anon, set in an unde­fined city but shot with sharp, clin­i­cal pre­ci­sion in Toron­to and New York, finds detec­tive Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) inves­ti­gat­ing a series of mur­ders. That the crimes have been com­mit­ted in the first place is as big a mys­tery as any poten­tial sus­pect or motive. In this future, every­one has a com­put­er implant that records each sec­ond of their lives and saves them to ​‘The Ether’ a huge grid not so dif­fer­ent from today’s data stor­age clouds. Nosey cops can quick­ly solve any crime because noth­ing is hid­den. Pri­va­cy and anonymi­ty have essen­tial­ly been erased. Only this time The Ether records have been hacked to cov­er up all trace of the murderer.

After much head-scratch­ing Sal dis­cov­ers a hack­er he sus­pects, ​‘The Girl’, played with steel and ellip­ti­cal mis­chief by Aman­da Seyfried, and sets up an elab­o­rate plot to entrap her. In a fash­ion befit­ting clas­sic noir of the 1940s, Sal gets sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than he bar­gained for. The Girl hacks his implant and caus­es night­mar­ish hal­lu­ci­na­tions includ­ing lucid mem­o­ries of his young son’s death (which Sal bears some respon­si­bil­i­ty for), flam­ing cor­ri­dors and rat-infest­ed apart­ments. Did she do it or is she being set-up to hide some­one with­in the Sal’s department?

The plot­ting of Anon is not dis­sim­i­lar to your aver­age noir pot­boil­er, albeit updat­ed for the avo-on-toast gen­er­a­tion. Owen is appro­pri­ate­ly hang­dog as Sal, a fig­ure tor­ment­ed by bro­ken mem­o­ries who becomes dou­bly despon­dent when even these for­lorn frag­ments are tam­pered with. Where the film excels is in its visu­al detail, as every last aspect of the set­ting is clas­si­fied exhaus­tive­ly on screen, from the fat con­tent of hot­dogs being flogged to pre­cise engine spec­i­fi­ca­tions of pass­ing vehi­cles. The result­ing dig­i­tal tapes­try is akin to the feel­ing of using an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty app or VR headset.

Despite the famil­iar­i­ty of its detec­tive sto­ry façade, Anon is a com­pelling inves­ti­ga­tion of bro­ken mem­o­ries and a warn­ing of a future com­pris­ing total sur­veil­lance and the end of pri­va­cy. It echoes ele­ments of Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind but is per­haps best imag­ined as a dark­er cousin of Mar­jorie Prime, or a com­pan­ion piece to the more mind-bend­ing episodes of Black Mirror.