Crew
Director/Screenplay – James Croke, Producers – Barry Brooker, Scott Clayton, Jordan Gertner, Gary A. Hirsch & Wych Kaosayananda, Photography – Wych Kaos, Music – J-Punch, Visual Effects Supervisor – Damon H. Chung, Visual Effects – Primer Studio (Supervisor – Vladan Djuric), Special Effects Supervisor – Phuwadon Taweeboon, Production Design – Toey Jaruvateekul. Production Company – Kaos Entertainment/Dreammaker Entertainment/Dreamspace/Oceanside Media/Livorno Media.
Cast
Sasha Luss (Hana), Alexis Ren (Jen), Margarita Bakhvalova (Little Girl), Ava Caryofyllis (Voice of Little Girl)
Plot
Hana is an agoraphobic who spends all her time in her apartment. She earns money as a videogame tester but is behind on the bills. She places her hopes on entering a gaming tournament to win the prize money. She is sent the new Omnia system to test out, which integrates with her mind. As Hana finds, this leaves her with the ability to mentally use her computer. She comes to believe that Omnia is warping reality around her.
Latency was a directorial debut for Australian James Croke. The name that surprised me the most on the credits was that of Wych Kaosayananda, the Thai director of films like Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002), Tekken: A Man Called X/Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014), The Driver (2019) and Two of Us (2020), among others. Kaosayananda, who also shortens has name to the less complicated Wych Kaos or simply Kaos, not only produces the film through his own company Kaos Entertainment but also acts as the film’s cinematographer. (The film was shot in Kaosayananda’s home ground of Thailand)
Latency felt like a throwback to the malevolent Videogame film of the 1980s/90s – see the likes of The Dungeonmaster (1984), Arcade (1994) and Brainscan (1994) and the more recent likes of Virtual Death Match (2020) or Choose or Die (2022). Perhaps the closest we come is to the Bollywood film Game Over (2019) where a woman videogame creator is wound into something that messes with her sense of what is reality and illusion.
The problem with Latency is that it seems all set up to be one type of film – the premise “When Hana, a professional gamer who suffers from acute agoraphobia, receives new equipment that enhances her game, she begins to wonder if it is reading her mind – or controlling it” suggests a mix of the A.I. film and the malevolent videogame film – only for nothing to happen. Sasha Luss activates the neural device and then we get about an hour of her moping around her apartment but never going out, her interactions with Alexis Ren (the only other character in the film), her entering the gaming tournament – and that is about it. It is an hour of the film spent waiting for something to happen and the gradual realisation that the film has no plot.
Latency starts to get interesting where it suggests that the Omnia link is creating something that messes with Sasha Luss’s sense of reality – a cute scene where a green ball appears and has a life of its own as she passes her hand over it and it vanishes or turns into a bird. And some cool ones where blocks emerge out of the apartment walls and seem to float in mid-air. Later there seems to be some ominous things occurring as noises and people outside are threatening Sasha. We don’t know what has happened to friend Alexis Ren whose dead body turns up but with no clue as to how she died. However, the film reaches an end that left me going “Is that it? Is that all there is to the film?” No exploring what the Omnia is, no venturing into the videogame and no exploring this new blurring of reality and illusion and what it means. Talk about a letdown.
Trailer here