Movie Review: LATENCY

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: June 14th, 2024 / 02:21 AM

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Sasha Luss, Alexis Ren
Writer: James Croke
Director: James Croke
Distributor: Lionsgate
Release Date: June 14, 2024

LATENCY begins with a sequence that seems straight out of a videogame. A young woman, Hana (Sasha Luss), has her heavily-bolted front door pounded upon, then knocked down, by an enormous monster. Hana shoots the invader, only to find more mysteriously charging in from behind her. Hana miraculously takes out all of these, too.

Then we find that this looks like a videogame because it is. Hana’s job is to test video and VR games for glitches (one of the monsters keeps de-rezzing). She’d like to enter a prestigious videogame competition that she previously lost.

We get a good look at Hana’s apartment, which is on the shabby and dark side, except for her high-end computer equipment. She owns a lot of Southeast Asian videogames, and has a well-above-average number of locks and bolts on her front door.

The door security turns out not to be because this is a particularly awful neighborhood. Hana is too agoraphobic to step out into the hall. She’s also so afraid of strangers that she makes a deliveryman wait out of sight in the stairwell while she opens the door to retrieve a package.

The one person Hana allows into the apartment is her friend and upstairs neighbor Jen (Alexis Ren), another young woman with a fortunate maternal streak. Jen makes sure that Hana has food and gets some sleep. Jen even takes Hana’s garbage out for her since, again, Hana can’t get herself out to the building’s dumpster.

At some point, Hana sees a child in the hallway who isn’t actually there, although Hana doesn’t realize it yet. But we do.

This is before Hana receives a package containing an Omnia device. Omnia looks like a headband but, as Hana explains to Jen, it is actually an interface between the owner/wearer’s brain and surrounding technology.

Omnia, in its feminine voice coming over Hana’s computer speakers, says it can read the owner’s mind before they’re aware of the thought. Once it’s calibrated, it works only for its designated user.

While using it may be cheating – since it’s not on the market yet, other players don’t have access – Hana thinks Omnia may be just the thing to help her win the competition. But of course, it has quite a few other effects as well. Or does it?

Writer/director James Croke gets big points for making LATENCY feel like it has everything it needs despite a very small cast and limited settings. When he needs big effects, like the steady stream of horrible monsters, they work well.

There are some well-chosen hat tips to THE SHINING, which usually (as here) creates a suitably unsettling mood.

Croke also gets fine performances from Luss as the sometimes ebullient, sometimes anguished Hana and from Ren as the playful, supportive Jen.

But because we see the hallucinatory child before Omnia ever shows up, we don’t know if Omnia is doing something new in Hana’s mind, or if she’s just having a breakdown that can be blamed on the tech.

At one point, something big happens. At first, Hana isn’t sure that it’s real. When we, and she, are satisfied that this is an actual event, we still don’t know why it occurred.

In the third act, it seems like the stakes ought to be rising, or answers ought to be arriving, or maybe both. Instead, LATENCY turns in on itself in a way that leaves us unsatisfied on a number of levels.

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