Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Marc Isaacs
Starring: Lynn El Safar, Ablikim Rahman, Ilinca Manolache, Marc Isaacs
A benefit of living close to the thriving media metropolis of Cardiff, earlier last week I was given a tour of the BBC and its new (ish - the facility was built in 2019) and shiny state-of-the-art broadcast centre at the heart of the city. The morning was fantastic. You could feel the cool, air-conditioned climate of the building, a steel and glass warren, crackling with possibility. Everywhere you looked there were people walking, moving, interacting with purpose: things happening before your very eyes. And everyone we met was so lively and clever and charismatic. I think that this is the secret of the Big British Castle: they choose only the best and the brightest human beings. Therefore, I was nonplussed at certain points in the tour where the subject of AI came up, specifically as to how the BBC is already using synthetic cognition, both in a manner that I suppose I expected - the green screen swoop of backgrounds filling out studios - but also in ways that took me aback; we were told that AI is being used to write reports of lower league Welsh football matches, and to generate artificial audio for weather reports. I see the principle – the reports are extra, and simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for inexpensive LLMs - but, perhaps as an automatic and unfair response, the disclosure (which is all out there as part of BBC transparency) made me feel a bit uneasy.
It really isn't like me to be a pessimist, and maybe I've simply been a witness to some of the more troubling capabilities of AI (ask a teacher about how pointless AI has rendered written coursework, how far it has devalued the process of thinking and writing), yet it seems like my concerns are shared by veteran docu-film director Marc Isaacs and writer Adam Ganz within their playful critique Synthetic Sincerity. In this layered satire, an AI research laboratory licenses Isaacs' existent corpus. This body of work is predicated upon documentary, such as Isaacs' breakout film Lift, set entirely inside a tower‑block lift (with Isaacs interviewing residents as they enter and leave the elevator) or the meta This Blessed Plot (with its Gooners and ghosts essaying a post-Brexit landscape); films that trade in the emotional textures of everyday life, which, even within their occasionally reflexive and arch frameworks, strive towards human truth.
Opening with a Bergman quote remonstrating that "film begins with the human face" (I wonder what the Swedish auteur would have made of Obsession, and Inde Navarrette's nonpareil face acting...), Synthetic Sincerity hard cuts to "Subject 22 Ethnicity Uyghur," a dapper middle-aged man, who is, IRL, Ablikim Rahman, the proprietor of a restaurant near to where Isaacs lives in London (or is he? Part of the fun of Isaacs' films is the chicanery: Subject 22/Ablikim could actually be a stalwart of regional theatre who has never fried ho fun in his life). A crew nonchalantly direct him - "Can you do happiness? Ok, now we need to do anger..." - as the nervous restaurateur strives to comply. The result is humbling, and near humiliating; a synthetic sincerity. The disorientating effect is compounded by a disembodied voiceover which intrudes on the proceedings, likewise instructing and condemning Marc (the director playing - a version of? - himself) as he investigates "Synthetic Sincerity Lab" ("where data learns to be human") and begins work with the technicians who constitute the emerging AI company.
The intangible voice turns out to belong to an AI Avatar, who is Marc's psychopomp into the world of Synthetic Solutions and has all the trendy beauty of contemporary hegemony: with her widespread eyes and heart shaped face she looks like Anya Taylor-Joy, and you can imagine digital cognition confecting such an on-point look (the avatar is actually played by flesh and blood actor Ilinca Manolache doing a Gen Z Max Headroom). The avatar is another aspect of Synthetic Sincerity's uncanny narrative valley, which reflects and distorts, challenges and confronts. We see a panel interrogate footage from one of Marc's films wherein a woman admits to shoplifting, with the delegation homing in on the grey ethical zone which the clip occupies, angling to use the value conflict in future programming. The action takes place in an industrial park so prosaic you expect to see the denizens of Wernham Hogg as extras: a faceless, bland corporation no different from a factory line warehouse. But even though Synthetic Sincerity is bearish about the prospect of AI, Isaacs and Ganz do not fashion a polemic, being too thoughtful and mischievous as filmmakers to provide simplistic paradigms. The film is more of a discourse which proposes uncomfortable truths about the system's progress: it can "think better than you can," facilitates nostalgia, and will be open source. Such lofty notions are yet juxtaposed by a sequence of motion capture filming which looks deeply artificial, is framed as absurdist, and relies upon undignified human interface.
Interjected are moments which prioritise immediate and tactile pleasure, such as a scene where one of the office workers at the Synthetic Sincerity lab shows off an eye-popping collection of retro pinball machines (including a 60s Batman one along with The Twilight Zone), games which rely on physical as well as mental interaction. Within this vein, there is a subplot involving a researcher (a great Lynn El Safah) and her grandmother who is in Beirut and subject to Israeli airstrikes, which, as a comparation with the digital guile of AI, is perhaps a little on the nose, the documentary footage of conflict resting uneasily with Synthetic Sincerity's impish presentation (these scenes come just before a clever digital rug pull involving green screen subterfuge). Such gear changes are characteristic of Isaacs' films, though, which are often about more than one thing at a time (a master theme is the perceived veracity of documentary) and are alive with ideas and storytelling approaches.
A low-key impediment which Synthetic Sincerity may face, however, is that, produced last year, the film is already slightly out of date. AI is evolving at rapid pace, and the facility has become an increasing feature in our lives. In climatic presentation, delivering what she believes is welcome news, El Safah's academic expounds that "very soon, with just a few minutes from your mobile, you'll be able to tell stories with the eloquence of writers and filmmakers through history." Doesn't it feel like we're already crossing that threshold?
Synthetic Sincerity is in UK cinemas from July 17th.
