Luna-tech in my head

As luck would have it, iBoy (the latest offering from Netflix) was the third recent film I saw in as many weeks that involved rape as a major plot point. The first was Paul Verhoeven’s incandescent Elle , where Isabelle Huppert has all but bagged the major awards of the year with her portrayal of the titular character. The second film took the other extreme: this was Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil , where the raped woman (Yami Gautam), grotesquely, consoles her sulking husband (Hrithik Roshan) who’s avoiding her. She even offers to leave him if it’d make him feel better. Meanwhile, her state of mind, her feelings are anybody’s guess: not one minute of screen time is afforded to these trifles. iBoy , based on the YA novel of the same name by Kevin Brooks, falls in between these two, both quality-wise and in terms of the sensitivity of the rape portrayal. Please note, however, that being better than Kaabil is not and will never be an achievement ( Raees , the other big Bollywood release of the month, couldn’t even manage this, but that’s a different story).

Directed by Adam Randall, iBoy begins with young Tom (Bill Milner) stumbling upon a gang rape in the London inner city neighbourhood he lives in. While fleeing from the thugs who’re raping his neighbour Lucy (Maisie Williams), he gets shot in the head. Miraculously, not only does Tom survive, he wakes up with fragments of his phone embedded in his head, giving him what can only be described as ‘smartphone superpowers’. He basically has the ability to manipulate technology: he can hack your phone, get into your email, your browsing history and so on. Are you quaking in your boots yet?

The problem with iBoy begins right there. When you have a premise as patently ridiculous as this, you have to let go of any cinema verité ambitions you might have in terms of technique and tonality. You can’t have, well, an iBoy fighting off thugs as realistic and lethal as the ones from Peaky Blinders . You can’t have lines like “You got superpowers? Most people die after being shot” being delivered with a straight face, especially when you know that this will be followed by a flickering YouTube page playing inside Tom’s head (think Sherlock , minus the manic energy, plus one hangdog teenager). Films that hinge upon the weird and the instantly implausible cannot afford to play it safe in terms of plot progression and cinematography.

For instance, Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices has Ryan Reynolds playing a man whose pet cat Mr Whiskers eggs him on to commit horrific murders even as his dog Bosco tries to rein him in; the pets are projections of his evil and generous side, respectively. But Reynolds and Satrapi realised the necessity of mixing it up: Instead of taking a ponderous, moralising approach, the film embraced the whackiness of its premise wholeheartedly, giving distinct personalities to Bosco and Mr Whiskers while letting Reynolds voice both parts. iBoy would have benefited from a similar sleight-of-hand. Instead, we have Tom hanging around awkwardly, trying to make small talk with Lucy, who he has a crush on. Williams doesn’t have a whole lot to do besides expressing suicidal tendencies and speaking in monosyllables, but in the odd scene where she is given more leeway, she shows us why she’s rated as one of the smartest young actors going around (give her a Doctor Who spin-off already?).

In the second half, Tom potters about trying to get higher and higher up the gangster ladder, desperate for revenge against the men who raped Lucy. The always excellent Rory Kinnear (Frankenstein’s monster from Penny Dreadful ) appears out of the blue and livens up proceedings for a bit before the film hurtles towards a fairly predictable climax.

For a film titled iBoy , there’s surprisingly little dialogue that’s actually about technology; again, not surprising given the implausible premise. You don’t want to get into stuff you cannot possibly explain. And the one extended sequence in the film that’s firmly grounded in technology is deeply problematic. When Tom wants to extract revenge against a bully at school, he uploads a video of the boy masturbating on a screen during the morning assembly, so that the entire school is party to the ensuing shame. Again and again, we are being fed a very precise notion: That technology begets power by tapping into its capacity to inflict humiliation on a grand scale, and that this is the most palpable way technology affects us. In Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam , a boy films his female friend surreptitiously while she’s in the shower. He then blackmails her with it, threatening to upload the video on the internet. In Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly , a cuckolded middle-aged man watches raunchy videos of his actress wife non-stop, to the point where he cannot get it up without the stimulus; a source of great shame for him. Kinnear himself played the British Prime Minister on the very first episode of Black Mirror . His character was blackmailed into having sex with a pig, live on national television.

It’s strange that in 2017, technology as a plot device can seemingly only lead to this collective hall of shame. Perhaps Elon Musk ought to extend his TV career beyond The Big Bang Theory and offer a word or two to scriptwriters around the planet.

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