Anon (film)


Anon is a 2018 British science fiction thriller film written and directed by Andrew Niccol, and financed by Sky Cinema Original Films. 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 who comes across a young woman 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.

Plot

Sal Frieland is a cop. In this future world, everyone's eyes--because of government-mandated biosyn ocular implants--record everything they see. Further, 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 pretty easy: You talk to a suspect, you access the person's record, you watch them committing the crime. Sal uses this ability for good, and uses it to enforce his own personal preferences as well.
Suddenly a woman appears in the movie. Her data block appears as "Error - Not Found" when Sal passes her on the street. That's not supposed to happen. It turns out that The Girl is able to access people's visual record, and erase selected portions of that record. This of course is great for criminals who want to erase the evidence of their crimes. It's also great for regular people who just want to hide things 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. Until we discover that people who are hiring her are also getting killed. We can't see who is killing them, because of course that is erased from their record, too. Since The Girl is off-grid 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 stock broker. 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 no, she explains when she contacts 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 and that should be it. The technology experts should have caught her and they can wrap this up. Unfortunately for the cops, The Girl 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 they have to try again. They imagine that they didn't reveal themselves in the previous attempt, so they good with Sal 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.
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. And she explains that she knows that. And that she's being framed by another hacker who has the same tech abilities that she has. She shows Sal her record. But of course that doesn't prove anything because we know she can manipulate records. But Sal believes her.
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, 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! 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. 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 had her algorithms to put everything back together, she was able to hang onto her memories, but no one could find her because the bits were scattered among millions of records.

Cast

On 28 January 2016, Clive Owen was cast in the film to play the role of a detective in a world without privacy. 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.
Principal photography on the film began in early September 2016 in New York City, while other scenes were shot in Toronto, with many shots being filmed at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

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." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 54 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
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." 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." 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." 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, Niccol is still terrific when he's breaking down rules, questioning protocol, and testing new ideas." 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| Truman Show or Gattaca, but comfortably more coherent than In Time and buoyed by its chilling relevance."