Australian film-maker Ivan Sen’s sci-fi Loveland asks some very Philip K Dickian questions, about the nature of consciousness and posthuman evolution. Ryan Kwanten is Jack, a dead-eyed hitman who – like so many screen assassins before him – is glum and self-hating but yearns for something greater. His backstory justifies his emotional emptiness, though this does little to warm the audience to an unsympathetic lead, played with bleary-eyed moroseness.
Films led by similar characters often use a love interest with distinct vulnerabilities to soften the hatched man’s misanthropy: like the woman hurt by Chow Yun-fat’s assassin in John Woo’s classic The Killer, fated to go blind without an operation, or the deaf-mute pharmacist Nicolas Cage dates in Bangkok Dangerous. In the wrong hands this sort of pairing serves a crude message: assassins have emotional needs too!
