A man awakes in a mysterious room…
Okay, so the very opening scene of Share? (2023) will sound eminently familiar to a lot of audiences. Men wake up in mysterious rooms a lot in cinema, and it’s probably no spoiler to add that, when they do, things don’t tend to go well for them, often as expressed across ninety minutes or more. But it would be a terrible mistake to brush off this particular example: Share? brings us an incredibly minimalist, but still expansive, challenging and unsettling vision. This is sci-fi, but only just: sci-fi is now at a perishingly small remove from everyday life, and the best films dealing with similar subject matter are aware of that, exploiting it to interrogate us, to make us feel suitably uncomfortable.
So back we go: a man awakes in a mysterious room – stark, locked, and a place he has no memory of ever entering. But what he does notice is that there’s a computer interface on one of the walls (and we, as the audience, are on the opposite side of that interface; we see the text-only computer commands, mirrored). The man (Melvin Gregg) has little choice but to try and communicate with the interface. It’s not straightforward; we see a lot of ‘invalid command’ rejections of his attempts to ‘speak’ to the computer. All it offers for him is the option to ‘share’. Share? Share what?
The man suddenly hits on something: it seems that, if he puts on some sort of a performance (which he discovers accidentally – the computer seems to like him making a fool of himself) then he gains credits, which he can then request to be exchanged for his basic needs – water, food, clothes. This is the net result of whatever he ‘shares’, if it seems popular enough. So it’s like a game, or a show, albeit one where the impressed or unimpressed audience is hidden. Only the upsurge in credits indicates whether some unknown ‘they’ like what they see. The man understands this, and begins, slowly, to learn the rules to his advantage. We get to know him – though he’s ever nameless – and, to some extent, it’s hard not to anthropomorphise whatever is in control of the console, probably because we still expect some kind of someone to be out there, doing things, monitoring things. (It’s an expectation we are probably soon to lose, given the increasing role of AI, but that’s by the by.) As the man experiments with the console, things expand somewhat; what ‘it’ is or ‘they’ are, they have not confined their interests to him alone. There are others.
First things first: this film is all about the brave decisions. Not only does it limit itself to an incredibly small set, but it omits even something as usual as a range of camera angles to explore it. We get one fixed camera throughout; the film’s promotional blurb says that this is the first feature film to ever be shot in such a way, which may indeed be the case – but for our purposes, here and now, it’s enough to say that this is a very bold choice, relying as a result entirely on the actors and the script to ‘fill’ the space, to generate the tension, to hold the interest. Therefore it’s a good thing that Melvin Gregg does such a good job here: he initially reacts to the sheer ridiculousness of the situation with a plausible blend of anger, hostility and gallows humour, but not without equally plausible moments of giving up, shrinking into himself. He’s also a very physical actor, who uses his physicality to try and please the audience which he gleans must be out there; putting us in line with the other, imagined audience, it gives us something to work with, too. But the film also uses clever, sharp editing, a simple but effective use of colour and light, and an equally effective accompanying score to bring everything together. It’s a well-constructed package and, when the film expands its universe, which it does and does well, it tantalises more about some hidden knowledge and power out there behind the walls somewhere: what could be more appealing to any audience, than the prospect of discovering and understanding something currently mysterious? People love a puzzle. Will we get a solution?
More than that, Share? does a great job of representing something unpalatable about the world we now live in, using the microcosm idea in a very literal way to raise pertinent questions. The overall feeling this brings ain’t a nice one. Sure, the world of credits and channels and so on in the film feels like a facet of the online world specifically, but what is all this except a sharp, distilled version of the kinds of transactions most people have to make on a daily basis in modern society? Playing by the rules, prostrating ourselves, earning credits which need to be spent on basic amenities, and getting punished for kicking back: this happens beyond the walls and the world of the film, this kind of brutal barter economy blended with a popularity contest. The best films on this subject matter recognise the comedy along with the tragedy: to echo a line spoken in Share?, ‘Rage and humour, it’s all we’ve got left’.
There are of course some echoes of other films and series here – Panic Button, Circle, Squid Game – but only in the sense that they interrogate the idea of audience and spectacle, and do it in a much, much more high-action way, whereas Share? is pared back, with only the briefest (though no less devastating) moments of overt brutality. No, things are done differently here, with careful, subtle reveals amounting to a kind of philosophical moral lesson. It has real heft, this process, and it hits hard, saving its hardest impact for last. Share? is a brave and powerful film, an unexpected gem which leaves something of itself with you. In a cinemascape now congested with an array of social media-type horrors, that’s the biggest compliment of all. This is a clever, clever film.
Share? (2023) is available to watch on VOD now.