At one point in this unsettling paranoia thriller, a character warns protagonist James (Harry Shum Jr) that he’s at risk of going down “a rabbit hole”. Just in case you didn’t catch that Lewis Carroll reference, another character who helps James out on his quest is a young woman with long flowing hair named Alice (Kelley Mack). There’s a bad guy who wears a hat later on too, but that might be an exegesis too far.
Nevertheless, director Jacob Gentry’s horror-tinged drama, its script by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall, ventures into the oneiric underground world of conspiracy theories and creepy online culture in 1999, when the latter at any rate was only just getting started. Like the recent British horror feature Censor or 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, this harks back to an era dominated by analogue technology, a time when it was possible, as is the case here, for hackers to interrupt regularly scheduled terrestrial programming with a clip of someone in an uncanny kabuki mask making freaky weird noises that just might make sense if played backwards.
