Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Natalie Kennedy
Starring: Rachel Shelley, Heida Reed, Wayne Brady
Stephen King's Misery gets a sci-fi spin, one that mines
our growing apprehensions around Artificial Intelligence, in director
Natalie Kennedy's confined thriller Blank. Rather than a writer being forced to work by an obsessive fan, the
author here is held captive by a malfunctioning android.
At some undetermined point in the all too near future, acclaimed author
Claire (Rachel Shelley) is suffering from a case of writer's
block. At the behest of her nervy publisher, Claire heads to a secluded
retreat designed to help writers focus on their work. The compound,
which resembles the sort of loft the protagonists of '90s erotic
thrillers always seemed to live in, is run entirely by AI, presenting
Claire with two servants. One is an Alexa-like holographic entity, which
she names Henry (Wayne Brady). The other is an android named Rita
(Heida Reed), who bears the appearance of a stereotypical 1950s
housewife and performs similar duties.
Claire is also presented with a gadget that attaches to her head in
order to stimulate creativity. When the gizmo brings back traumatic
childhood memories, Claire dispenses with it, but begrudgingly accepts
its aid when she fails to find any natural stimulation. This leads to a
flashback sub-plot in which we see the young Claire (Annie Cusselle) live out a Cinderella-esque life of confined misery, with her
overbearing blind mother (Rebecca Clare-Evans) assuming the role
of the ugly sisters.
The idea of a writer rushing towards a deadline takes centre stage when
a cyber attack leads to the compound being breached by hackers. Henry
goes largely offline while Rita is reset to believe that she can only
allow Claire to leave once she has finished writing her book. Unable to
access the exits without Rita's approval, Claire is forced to knuckle
down and write.
Blank examines AI in a couple of ways we haven't seen
before. It raises the question of whether a machine can understand art.
When Claire presents Rita with what she considers her finished book, the
android rejects it, claiming it doesn't have a real ending. As art is
chiefly subjective, can it be judged by a machine programmed to view the
world through an objective lens? What would an android make of a Jackson
Pollock painting?
Kennedy and screenwriter Stephen Herman also delve into how
frustrating it can be to interact with modern technology. Rita isn't the
usual sort of malevolent machine we expect from sci-fi. She isn't a
direct menace but her adherence to a strict code and a thinly defined
set of rules means she poses an existential threat to Claire. Watching
Claire grow increasingly frustrated by Rita repeating the same stock
answers and suggestions, you'll likely think of how annoying it is when
a self-serving checkout refuses to scan a barcode, or how a Captcha
keeps telling you you've picked the wrong pictures of boats.
The ideas Blank brings up are more interesting to ponder
than to actually watch play out on screen however. Kennedy shuns the
obvious potential for satire inherent in the scenario, resulting in a
film that's suffocatingly dry in parts. It never quite works as a horror
movie because the threat to Claire isn't immediate enough and Kennedy
fails to communicate the idea of time running out in a sufficient manner
to generate the requisite tension. The flashback subplot never quite
gels with the main narrative. We expect a Shyamalan-esque coalescing of
the two in the climax, but the ending of one has no substantial bearing
on the other.
Shelley and Reed are both excellent in their respective roles, with the
latter giving one of the more convincingly robotic performances I've
seen, but the movie never pits their characters against each other in a
thrilling enough way to make the sparks truly fly. The film's failure to
interrogate why Rita has clearly been designed to appeal to the whims of
men also feels like a missed opportunity to question who pulls the
strings of our rapidly evolving world.
Blank is on UK/ROI VOD from
January 8th.
