By Keri O’Shea
‘Based on an idea by Franck Khalfoun’: these are surely words to warm the heart for many horror fans, albeit based on rather little. But his remake of Maniac in 2012 was stylish and redemptive, and his subsequent absence from what I’m reluctant to call ‘the scene’ has no doubt been noted. So here we are, several years later, with a new offering – i-Lived – a film he also directed and edited. So far, so good.
It’s very early indeed in the film that we’re able to work out that Khalfoun has a talent for representing rather unlikable young men on our screens: oh, I know that’s based on an unrepresentative sample, but if you can make Elijah Wood into a terrifying creep, then you’ve clearly got form. With that in mind, we meet Josh (comedian Jeremiah Watkins), a young man whose personality is an unpalatable blend of dude-bro, frustrated geek and infantile Gen-Xer: when him and his friends aren’t wondering aloud how they can bang hot bitches, Josh hosts an online video channel, where his focus is reviewing phone apps. He lives for his follower count: this rather gets in the way of him paying his rent, pleasing his parents (who paid a lot of money to see him through college) or holding down a relationship, but for Josh, that’s always a set of issues for the next day. Well, one day he reviews an app called ‘i-Lived’. It’s meant to be a motivational application which helps you towards your life goals – Josh chooses ‘getting a six pack’ so he can attract women – but it falls flat, so he pans it online and thinks no more about it. That is, until the app kicks back into life while he’s at a party and, in a roundabout way, gets him a girl he thinks is out of his league.
Based on that small victory, Josh decides to keep on following the app’s advice, getting what he wants in return for uploading video ‘proof’ of his progress to the app’s website. From a country mile you could probably guess that the app’s requests would get sinister, and this duly happens. Whilst finding time for irrelevant sex scenes with a character-free girlfriend because boobs still sell, the plot thickens…
Well, to an extent. I like the idea of linking supernatural goings-on to modern technology, really I do – Unfriended was better than I ever expected – but i-Lived really does fail in what it tries to do here, i.e. to bring us a very modern spin on a parable of greed, with all the otherworldly fallout you’d possibly expect. The film badly lacks polish, and no small part of the fault must be laid at the door of the script, which could have used a lot more crafting to really make these characters work. When you have a sequence consisting of nothing much more than ‘Calm down!’ ‘No, YOU calm down!’ then what you have on screen is wasted time. I also felt like I was having the plot spelled out to me very, very carefully in places – as if I’d been given a bunch of tranquilisers and then asked to land a plane. Genre fans don’t need this, they’ve seen a thousand horror films and they can fathom what’s going on without the letters being writ ten feet high (read also: the big reveal ‘hidden’ in the app’s name. For shame.)
Adding to that, there are some surprisingly clumsy oversights during the film which, in their way, also detract from any sense of dread which may have been allowed to build. One of the app’s instructions to Josh makes little grammatical sense (oh I know, it’s pedantry, but would you obey a malign entity which couldn’t even master the lingo? I bloody wouldn’t.) – Josh gets a new tattoo when the app tells him to ‘be a rebel’, but it’s clearly not a new tattoo; the lights keep going out as a kind of convenient and cost-effective short-cut for ‘bad things going on’, and the whole ‘just a dream’ shtick seems to be used several times to pad the film out, which is pretty unforgivable. Yes, the film warms up somewhat, but it’s rather too little too late to redeem a plot which comes across as cartoon strip, so the gusto of the last few minutes is wasted, even if they’re some of the most attractive scenes in the film.
I think that i-Lived sets out to weave a horror story from the way that, yeah, many people live and die by their online presence these days – possibly thinking that it wouldn’t be too much of a leap to link this phenomenon to something of more standard horror fare. Sadly, i-Lived isn’t the indictment of how we live now which it might have been, and nor is it quite the update to an age-old yarn which Khalfoun might’ve imagined or hoped. This is a shame. Khalfoun is clearly capable of good things, far better things than this, and so ultimately it’s still the success of Maniac which could draw me towards his upcoming Amityville project – but goodwill and good memories can only carry a director so far.
i-Lived will be available to download on 27th June 2016, and available to buy on DVD on 11th July. The i-Lived app, which syncs with the film, will also be available to buy from iTunes and Google.