Anon (film)

Anon is a 2018 British[2][3][4] science fiction thriller film written and directed by Andrew Niccol, and financed by Sky Cinema Original Films.[5] The film stars Amanda Seyfried and Clive Owen, with Colm Feore, Mark O'Brien, Sonya Walger, Joe Pingue, and Iddo Goldberg appearing in supporting roles. Set in a futuristic world where privacy and anonymity no longer exist, the plot follows a troubled detective (Owen) who comes across a young woman (Seyfried) who has evaded the government's transparency system. The film was released internationally as a "Netflix Original" on the streaming service, from 4 May 2018, whilst in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the film was released in cinemas by Altitude Film Distribution and through on-demand by Sky Cinema on 11 May 2018.

Anon
Theatrical release poster
Directed byAndrew Niccol
Produced by
  • Daniel Baur
  • Andrew Niccol
  • Oliver Simon
Written byAndrew Niccol
Starring
Music byChristophe Beck
CinematographyAmir Mokri
Edited byÁlex Rodríguez
Production
company
Distributed byAltitude Film Distribution (United Kingdom)
Release date
  • 4 May 2018 (2018-05-04) (Netflix)
  • 11 May 2018 (2018-05-11) (United Kingdom)
Running time
100 minutes[1]
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Plot

Sal Frieland (played by Clive Owen) is a detective. In this future world, everyone's eyes--because of government-mandated biosyn ocular implants--record everything they see. Furthermore, everyone's eyes are equipped with augmented reality capabilities. The augmented reality displays a data block beside every person within sight. The augmented reality also allows the police to access any person's individual recording history. This makes being a detective straightforward: you talk to a suspect, you access the person's record, and you watch them committing the crime. Sal uses this ability for good (solving crimes), and uses it to enforce his own personal preferences as well (letting a maid get away with a theft to pay rent, when the maid stole from an arrogant woman who Sal didn't deem worthy of protection).

A mysterious woman ("The Girl," played by Amanda Seyfried) appears in the movie. Her data block appears as "Error - Not Found" when Sal passes her on the street. Sal notes that this shouldn't be possible. It turns out that The Girl is able to access people's visual record, and erase selected portions of that record. This is evident because of Sal finds his inability to access footage of him seeing The Girl.

Sal and other police officers are presented with several cases of murder. Each case is similar to each other because their victims' visual recording before death show the point of view of the murderer instead of the victim themselves. Digging deeper into each murder case, Sal and his colleageues find the victims have requested the services of someone to erase the evidence of their crimes. Other victims were less criminal and were motivated to hide experiences that they're embarrassed about. Anon charges a fee for this service, she also erases herself from the person's memory, and everything seems to be going fine. Since The Girl is off-grid (illegally) and has these unheard-of-before abilities, she is suspect number one.

Sal meets with other detectives and the department's technology experts in a big concrete room to figure out what to do. There's no way to track her down because, by definition, she's off-grid and invisible to their technology. The group decides that Sal should go undercover.

Sal builds up a 30-day history of living as a stockbroker. He includes a brief affair with a hooker. He then tries to find The Girl to hire her. She goes by the code name Anon and explains she's the one to contact him--he can't reach her or contact her. When the time is right, she will find him, which in due course she does. Sal asks her to erase the affair with the hooker, which she does. The technology experts plan to catch her while she is in the process of erasing the affair, but unfortunately, The Girl (Anon) has covered her tracks in a way they didn't expect. Using a sequence of anonymizing proxies that appear organized in a Fibonacci spiral, she has prevented the cops from finding her.

So the cops and the tech experts decide to try again. They imagine that they didn't reveal themselves in the previous attempt, so they go with Sal in making a second attempt. This time, the experts say they will catch her. Of course Sal agrees. And of course the experts don't catch her this time either and one of Sal's colleageues gets murdered.

Meanwhile, Sal and Anon decide that they're interested in one another. And they have a brief and torrid affair. Since she has let her guard down, Sal explains that she is a suspect. She explains that she knows that and how she's being framed by another hacker who has the same technical abilities. She shows Sal her record of the night his colleague got murdered during his second sting. Her record shows her finding Sal's colleague already dead when she runs away. Despite knowing she can manipulate records, Sal believes her alibi. The cops tell Sal that the case is over, that he's too close to it now, and to back off. He doesn't back off and his bosses discover that he's still investigating. So they suspend him.

Sal and Anon try to get together again. Anon creates a fake emergency so the cops watching Sal's place will leave. But when she gets there, Sal's vision is messed up and he sees things that aren't there. Specifically, he sees that his apartment building is on fire, and the hallways are filled with flames. For some reason, he pulls his gun and aims into the flames. The apparent scene changes and now it appears that Sal has actually shot his neighbor. When confronted by his bosses, they don't buy his explanation because they have his unaltered visual recording, so they fire him.

It is apparent to both Sal and Anon that the real murderer is trying to frame Anon for all the deaths. And that the murderer now wants to kill them both. In the film's final confrontation, the two try to kill the murderer, and Sal is shot. While Anon and the murderer struggle, Sal reaches for the gun, which fell on the floor. The murderer is monitoring everything that both Sal and Anon are seeing, so he notices when Sal reaches for his gun, and shoots him again. While the two hackers struggle moving out into the hall, Sal figures out that he's being watched--through his own eyes--so he reaches for the gun without looking at it. Eventually he gets the gun and goes out into the hall where the fight continues unabated. The trick is that Sal has to shoot the murderer without looking at him. And with Anon actively fighting him. So he looks down the hallway, then looks away, then points his pistol down the hallway without looking. He shoots and fortunately, he misses Anon and hits the murderer. Once it's all over the cops now discover that the murderer was one of their own technology experts, Cyrus Frear (Mark O'Brien). So all is forgiven, Sal is rehired and reinstated, and Sal needs to reconcile his life with Anon.

During the end sequence, we learn that Anon hid herself by storing bits of herself in everyone else's public record. As long as she has her algorithms to put everything back together, she is able to hang onto her memories. But no one could find her otherwise because the bits were scattered among millions of records.

Cast

Production

On 28 January 2016, Clive Owen was cast in the film to play the role of a detective in a world without privacy.[6] On 8 March 2016, Amanda Seyfried came on board to star in the film, playing a woman with no digital footprint who is invisible to the police.[7]

Principal photography on the film began in early September 2016 in New York City, while other scenes were shot in Toronto,[8] with many shots being filmed at the University of Toronto Scarborough.[9]

Reception

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 37% based on 49 reviews, and an average rating of 5.25/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Lacking enough depth to fulfill its evident ambitions or enough excitement to work as a sci-fi action thriller, Anon lives down to its title in the most glumly predictable ways."[10] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 54 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[11]

On RogerEbert.com, Nick Allen gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4, saying that as Niccol's film lays out its sci-fi rules, "Anon can be as much as fun as listening to someone explain every single rule of a board game, when all you want is to just start playing."[12] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 2 stars out of 5, saying: "The impact of the action is lost because we can't be sure of the status of what appears to be happening, and there is something a little bit boring about the conundrum."[13] Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Niccol's paranoid anxieties about the totalitarian dangers of cyberspace feel oddly glib and dated, light on thrills or narrative logic."[14] Blake Goble of Consequence of Sound gave the film a "B" grade, saying: "While the film's final thesis is a Facebook post with typos at best (delete your accounts, and so on), Niccol is still terrific when he's breaking down rules, questioning protocol, and testing new ideas."[15] James Dyer of Empire gave the film 3 stars out of 5, saying: "With a story that serves mainly as delivery mechanism for its message this is no [The] Truman Show or Gattaca, but comfortably more coherent than In Time and buoyed by its chilling relevance."[16]

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References
  1. "ANON (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 1 May 2018. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  2. Shepherd, Jack (25 January 2018). "Sky to start making its own movies". The Independent. Retrieved 12 May 2018.
  3. McDonald, Andrew (25 January 2018). "Sky moves into original films in latest content push". Digital TV Europe. Informa. Retrieved 14 May 2018.
  4. Admin (8 May 2018). "Sky Cinema Original Film 'ANON' gets a brand new clip". The Arts Shelf. Retrieved 12 May 2018.
  5. Travis, Ben (25 January 2018). "Sky Confirms Plans to Create and Release Original Films". Empire. Retrieved 14 May 2018.
  6. Barraclough, Leo (28 January 2016). "Clive Owen Boards Andrew Niccol's Sci-fi Thriller 'Anon'". Variety. Penske Business Media. Retrieved 6 September 2016.
  7. Rosser, Michael (8 March 2016). "Amanda Seyfried joins Andrew Niccol sci-fi 'Anon' with Clive Owen". Screen Daily. Screen International. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
  8. CS (4 September 2016). "Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried Photos from the Anon Set". ComingSoon.net. Mandatory. Retrieved 6 September 2016.
  9. Quijano, Bianca (9 September 2016). "Filmmakers find UTSC "perfect for production"". University of Toronto Scarborough. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
  10. "Anon (2018)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 17 May 2020.
  11. "Anon Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
  12. Allen, Nick (5 May 2018). "Anon". RogerEbert.com. Ebert Digital LLC. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
  13. Bradshaw, Peter (4 May 2018). "Anon review – Andrew Niccol's killer-hacker thriller suffers from identity theft". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  14. Dalton, Stephen (3 May 2018). "'Anon': Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  15. Goble, Blake (6 May 2018). "Film Review: Anon Sends a Detective Into a Waking Nightmare in the Neo-Near Future". Consequence of Sound. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  16. Dyer, James (8 May 2018). "Anon Review". Empire. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
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