The world has changed a lot since The Collingswood Story pioneered Screenlife storytelling in 2002. Nickelback had the top single that year, mid-budget films still penetrated the top of the box office, and George Bush was president. Tate McRae wouldn’t be born for another year, and George R.R. Martin was still working on the fourth book in A Song of Ice and Fire. The biggest change between 2002 and now, however, is the omnipresence of the screen. Technological interfaces and electronic devices grip our world so tightly that one can no longer order McDonald’s without touching a massive and greasy screen. Filmmakers in 2002 and well after were all digital immigrants, people who spent a significant portion of their lives without the ubiquity of digital screens, and they still make up the majority of established filmmakers. LifeHack, the newest Screenlife venture from maverick producer Timur Bekmambetov and Bazelevs Entertainment, looks a bit different from most of the Screenlife films that precede it, and 29-year-old first-generation digital native director Ronan Corrigan likely has something to do with that.
The most well-known and noteworthy Screenlife titles — The Collingswood Story, Unfriended, Searching, Profile, Host — exploit the screen for a unique assortment of fears. Unfriended: Dark Web ventures into the darkest corners of the Internet and encapsulates the best of the format’s ability to harness digital incel-y consternation. Even the sci-fi Resurrected ends up on the more fanatical and dystopian side of things; indeed, the most notable Screenlife titles share a general apprehensive awe of the horrors of the web. They are thrillers and horror flicks with a technological pessimism at heart. (An irony considering how innovative these films use technology to tell their stories.) LifeHack, though still hanging around in the thriller-adjacent genre of heists, emphasizes a different and more personal side to the omnipresence of screens: they can also create community.
The community in this case revolves around Kyle (Georgie Farmer), a savvy British high schooler with a difficult home life and an absent father. He sulks through his waking hours (and some hours he should certainly be sleeping) in first-person shooter games and bezzles other Internet bezzlers with three very-online friends. The four’s petty “gotcha” crimes evolve into a targeted operation to drain tech plutocrat and right-wing media guy Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles) of his crypto fortune. It’s an equal bit Robin Hood and Reddit-fashioned trolling, and the four friends, as inseparable as bread and butter, begin to feel their community threatened for the first time as the operation escalates.
They all have trauma or household problems to escape from; their online friends become a sanctuary of safety and a beacon of belonging. Kyle’s childhood friend who moved to America, Petey (James Scholz), does his best to be the moral voice in the Discord server and also brings a self-taught coding expertise while trying to live up to the schooling standards of his Asian immigrant parents. Kyle crushes on Alex (Yasmin Finney), another American and the only woman in the group. While her expertise is in creating fake IDs, she refuses on moral grounds to make them for minors or anyone over 21 (whose purposes she assumes would be more sinister). Her mom is also a drug addict. The last friend is fellow countryman Sid (Roman Hayeck-Green), another tech genius and communications hacker. His abusive father might be the film’s ugliest domestic problem.
Bekmambetov, Screenlife’s greatest evangelist and producer, loosens the form’s definition a bit with Corrigan’s debut. Everything still originates in the capture of video screens, but Corrigan takes more liberties with what it’s like to be on those screens than ever before. The displays and monitors are used more as dynamic canvases with constant movement and never-ending possibilities than as actual replicas of real computer and phone screens. The most obvious difference in this regard is between what we would see on our screens and the narrowed focus present on the screens of LifeHack. The chaotic interfaces of Unfriended or Transformers: The Premake and the simplicity of a Zoom meeting room in Host or email inboxes in Profile are substituted for multi-layered windows zoomed in to the portion of the computer or phone that Corrigan wants us to pay attention to. Everything is captured on screen, but, similar to a cinematographer pulling focus, more of those screens are removed after the fact than in most earlier Screenlife iterations.
The heist that ultimately comes is one of the most engaging cinematic heists in years, and that’s in large part because of how different it is. The computer they need to access is offline, so they still need an on-the-ground presence to pull off their trick — but most of the heist is dependent on coding, USBs, and GPS tracking. And, even more so than in real life, new obstacles can arise in a fraction of a second on the Internet — and don’t need a human subject with a visible and predictable geographical presence — and that makes for a more enthralling burglary. There is also the enigma of the security systems and coding hacks: we only know as much as we need, which is more than in similar tech scenes in something like Mission: Impossible, and the rest remains a mystery. Anything can happen at any time.
Corrigan made LifeHack in his late 20s, which means that he comes from the first generation of digital natives who have never really known a world without the Internet in our pockets, and he captures what it feels like to age with the Internet better than most digitalist filmmakers before him. From Club Penguin and goth Tumblr to porn pop-ups and Discord gaming and even some unfortunate hentai, LifeHack understands the aesthetic experience of the World Wide Web better than most films. The specific viral YouTube videos and the comings and goings of certain apps and platforms contextualize the digital world of his first feature film in the same way that old-timey clothing or music does in a period piece, iterating a shared language between the film and the passing years of technology the characters live within.
If Unfriended: Dark Web is Screenlife showing the Internet at its worst, LifeHack, while not unafraid of that darkness, is much more optimistic about its potential. (The still unreleased R#J adapts Romeo and Juliet to the age of Letterboxd and celebrity lockscreens, but, as we all know, romance doesn’t mean happy endings.) The friends here endure their conflicts, but they remain friends in the end, realizing an online life that translates to real-world relationships and where the world seems better off because of a tight-knit Discord server. It’s a fitting place to land, since Corrigan moves farther away from laptop screens and more toward Snapchats, phones, and security cameras than Bekmambetov’s earlier productions. The script also understands that the Internet is a deeply silly place where, the more time one spends on it, the sillier the real world likewise seems. Even the double entendre title points to a more positive spin: who couldn’t do with a helpful life hack here and there?
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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