LifeHack (dir. Ronan Corrigan)
The first of two atypical heist movies I caught at PFF34 breaks the mold by adhering to the “screen life” format, a subset of the found footage genre which takes place entirely on a computer screen. LifeHack utilizes this framing device to follow the exploits of four young adults who use their computer savvy to rob a stereotypical tech-bro billionaire of a large sum of cryptocurrency. Cuz, ya know, screw that guy.
It all seems easy at first. A little bit of hacking here, some social engineering there, and all four of our protagonists will have the funds to follow their dreams, all at relatively little expense for their mark. As with any heist movie, mistakes and their resultant band-aids start to pile up, and soon it’s a race against the clock to avoid the authorities and hold on to the loot without arousing further suspicion.
Films in this style live and die by their ability to sell the framing device as real while also keeping things as cinematic as a computer screen can be. In the case of LifeHack it comes down to showcasing the ease with which the primary user can bounce between different digital interfaces, while also creating a through-line for each layer of the plot. In such a way, the simple dragging and dropping of windows, monitoring of chat boxes, and a near constant stream of video calls provides the same breathless intensity one would find in an Ocean’s movie. And since we live in a world where everything has a camera pointed at it, our merry band of Gen Z thieves aren’t just parked at desks the whole time — they frequently enter the real world while we watch.
The onslaught of notifications and other on-screen bells and whistles may prove overstimulating for some crowds (at this particular screening a frustrated duo of seniors walked out, utterly perplexed by the film’s format), but one man’s “this is too much” is another man’s “WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO?!?” I am that other man.
Bolstered by believable lead performances, most notably from Yasmin Finney, as our leading man’s potential object of affection turned hands-on thief, LifeHack is a powerful combination of filmmaking ingenuity and real-world verisimilitude. Who says you need slick outfits and an EMP to steal a ton of money with your buddies?
The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
Another EMP-free heist film comes from the lens of indie master Kelly Reichardt. It stars Josh O’Connor, who is in THREE films at PFF, the talented sonofabitch. Here he plays James Blaine Mooney, a husband and father whose humdrum life is interrupted by his own ambition. Said ambition is dissimilar to his much more successful brother, who is easily the preferred of the two Mooney boys by their parents (Bill Camp & Hope Davis). James decides to get into art theft, and he’s going to start with a local art gallery, complete with sleeping guards, a lax alarm system, and artwork of just the right profile: rare enough to be worth a sum, but not so rare as to launch a giant investigation (or so he thinks).
The plan is as simple as it gets (mind you, it’s 1970): walk in, take the art, leave. James can’t do it himself since he’s a regular patron of the gallery, so he hires two underlings to get their hands dirty. And when one of them bails, he makes a rookie mistake and hires a wildcard … a wildcard with loose lips who subsequently gets caught robbing a bank.
Being a Reichardt film, The Mastermind moves at a leisurely pace, and is entirely absent of the expected style of a heist film, short of the incredible period detail. In execution, it’s not really about the robbery so much as it’s about unchecked ambition, unearned ego, and the crippling feeling of realizing you’ve connected yourself to someone you can’t trust, or worse: realizing that you are the person who can’t be trusted, and that you’ve doomed your loved ones to be connected to your own dumb ass.
There’s a slow-building tension that permeates the film, dichotomous to the overall sleepy and relaxing tone. I’m reminded of a meme showing a muppet in a boardroom of besuited humans with the caption “TFW you accidentally became important at work.” The Mastermind is a story about a guy who wanted exactly what he got, and quickly discovered that he never should have wanted it in the first place.
It’s also a showcase for the talents of Josh O’Connor, who is able to sell Mooney’s meekness, depict his perversion into a criminal, and then evoke drama and humor from the resulting plight. None of this would be possible without his wife and kids acting as dramatic foils as well as ties to the life our anti-hero forsook. Mrs. Mooney, played by Alana Haim, another wildly talented young person, does so much with very little screen time. A look of judgement, a frustrated gesture — one of the most powerful moments of any film at PFF features just her voice over the phone.
The Mastermind played as AMC’s “screen unseen” last week, and all I can think is that mainstream audiences probably had no idea what to do with this one. But that’s fine. They’re wrong.
