Hacked (or to give it its full title, Hacked: A Double Entendre of Rage Fueled [sic] Karma) has an interesting pedigree. In 2021, writer/director Shane Brady and his wife, producer Emily Zercher, were phished out of a sizable amount of money – $20,000 – intended as a down-payment on a new home. Having lost everything, they then had a nightmare of a time trying to get compensated by a strangely unconcerned bank (though actually, when you think about how banks operate, it’s not that strange). This film eventually came about as a big old ‘fuck you’, a fantasy of what they’d have liked to do to the hacker – or, as they identify at the end of the film itself, technically a phisher, though ‘hacker’ certainly fits better lexically with what they go on to do to the imagined thief in the film.
So, this is a fantasy with its feet in reality. The first ten minutes of the film are based on real events, before things head off in a more fantastical direction where ‘their’ hacker is reimagined as a powerful ubergeek called The Chameleon (Chandler Riggs). In the world of the film, his attention was drawn by the family’s two teenage sons roundly beating him in an online game but, it’s suggested, this guy has ripped off so many people in so many ways, he might even have found his way to them randomly. But the fact is, he has found them, he has cloned an email to get them to sign over a massive sum of money, and it has left them with a real hankering for revenge. That part is true. It’s what happens next which isn’t.
Here, the family, now the Rumble family, tracks him down, abducts him and begins to torture him – ostensibly to get him to give up his passwords so they can get their money back, but thanks to the surprise presence of a sympathetic Santa (!) with a magic candy cane which can undo actions which have already been done, the family gets the opportunity to torture The Chameleon to death as many times as they like and in a series of increasingly imaginative ways…
Interestingly, Hacked screened at Celluloid Screams on the same day as Pascal Laugier’s existential torture epic Martyrs, and it makes for an interesting comparison, because you really couldn’t get two films each taking torture as a central plot device which play out more differently than these two. It’s like comparing Hostel to Tom and Jerry. Hacked is very much on the side of the latter, if that needed saying, but more than just that, it comes positively drenched in the new conventions of online content creation so familiar from the likes of YouTube and TikTok. Endless, flashy edits, self-referential dialogue, music, call-backs to other media (the two boys in the film are, of course, content creators in their own right and their footage gets added in for context and backstory regularly throughout) and frequent gags, bordering on in-jokes, run throughout the film.
Online gaming…perpetual torture…a family bonding exercise…Santa…either those elements will speak to you as being pleasantly quirky and entertaining, or else make you baulk that it’s coming at you for a full length feature and honestly, once you’ve picked your camp, you’re unlikely to see anything which makes you swap your allegiances. Stylistically, it all feels very much like it could easily have been released piecemeal on a popular video sharing network, if you could show the type of comedic violence which forms up the bedrock of the film, and (whisper it) it may well have worked better in that format. As a feature – a ninety minute feature – it begins to feel repetitive and honestly, more like a family joke (or at least a project likely to speak mainly to a fairly niche audience) which can’t justify this kind of sustained runtime. That’s not to say that there aren’t good moments here, and more than a few jokes which land: it just begins to lose appeal once the novelty value of the central premise has lodged itself in your head.
Still, using film as a direct way of getting catharsis for a real world problem, one which unfortunately affects thousands of people on a daily basis, is an interesting and novel way to get over a life-changing experience like this and there are many people out there who may resonate with the message. Lots of other people will appreciate the zany, over-the-top humour. For the rest of us, aside from counting our lucky stars if we haven’t been hacked (or phished), we may find that there isn’t quite enough to go around here for a general audience feature-length film – as much as we may all wish the filmmakers and their family and friends the very best, and feel relief for how their real-life version of this situation finally resolved itself. Though it’s still not quite clear how this film is in any way a ‘double entendre’, or contains any: when someone is getting their legs destroyed with a cheese grater, where’s the veiled innuendo? A minor semantic quibble, perhaps.
Hacked: A Double Entendre of Rage Fueled Karma (2025) featured at this year’s Celluloid Screams.