The idea behind Off the Hook (Netflix), or, to give it its French title, Détox, is intriguing. Roommates Léa (Tiphaine Daviot) and Manon (Manon Azem) start to suspect that their smartphones, to which they are practically glued, are making their lives worse. They attempt to do a dry January on their digital lives, eschewing all devices and therefore emails, texts, social media and apps, for 30 days.
They come at the project from different angles. Léa is so obsessed with her ex-boyfriend that she stalks him to the point of arrest. That isn’t hyperbole: she uses a spy app to watch him, sitting down with a bowl of popcorn as if she were about to watch a film. She also logs in to his emails and keeps tabs on his social media. When he changes his passwords and blocks her, she turns up at his workplace, ranting about how she still loves him. There is an odd undercurrent of “well, everyone does it, right?”. Either I am not getting the joke, or I am alone in not having any desire to log in to my exes’ emails to see what they have been up to this week.
