Written and directed by Noah Hutton
Starring Dean Imperial, Madeline Wise and Babe Howard
Running time: 1hour and 44 Minutes

by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy

When I sat down to watch this film, I knew very little about the plot and nothing about anyone involved in the making of it. I’d seen a couple stills, and that was it. It looked like maybe it was a near-future dystopia that somehow involved a lot of camping? This is rather common with films on the festival circuit. You get some rough idea of what it is and make your decision whether to watch it based on that. And yet, somehow, from those tiny scraps, Lapsis managed to meet all of my expectations, and then some.

After viewing, I learned that the writer/director, Noah Hutton, is the son of Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton. Still, other than being a HUGE Nero Wolfe fan, this wouldn’t have generated any expectations from the film. He’s made a number of shorts and documentaries, but Lapsis is his narrative feature debut.

Honestly, I hope the marketing for this keeps things vague for people. I think it works to its advantage. And in that spirit, I’ll attempt to keep this review free of too much info as well. Just as I’d gleaned from the brief trailer, this is a slightly quirky, near-future, somewhat dystopian world where a new piece of technology has been developed but the company relies on the gig-economy in order to help build its infrastructure.

What Hutton does really well is just drop you right into this world with a butt-ton of jargon. Ray (Dean Imperial) is the audience’s surrogate. He’s a bit of a luddite, but needs to dive into this new-fangled world in order to earn extra money to help pay for his half-brother’s (Babe Howard, Hutton’s actual half-brother) medical treatment. As all of this jargon starts to overwhelm Ray, he realizes he doesn’t need to understand any of it to do the work and get paid. At the same time, the audience has the same realization that the world we are seeing is close enough to our own and we don’t really need to know the ins and outs to get the point.

While on the job, Ray meets a number of different people and we start to see all the ways that, to some extent, other people and, to a greater extent, the company keep chipping away at your earnings so that you end up stuck working to “just get a little bit more”. The character that Ray really starts to learn all of this from is fellow gig-worker Anna (Madeline Wise). As she shows him more, they start to form a nice friendship, but there are also some seeds of distrust that threaten this bond.

While none of the themes are especially new, this does put it into a modern-day perspective for those that may not think about all of those “essential” gig-workers that are holding society together with bits of twine and chewing gum. For that, I think this is well worth watching.

Add to that, Lapsis is quite competently made on a modest budget. One thing that can kill the mood for this sort of film is to try to stretch the technology beyond what you can afford. Instead, Hutton kept all of the tech close enough to modern day or vague enough that you don’t bother to question it. The performances are all at least good, and some are very good. I really enjoyed the chemistry between Wise and Imperial. I would say that my only complaint for the film is the slightly cutesy/hokey scene towards the end between them, that just seems to push it a little too far. Otherwise, between the message and the quality of this, I thought this was a really fun watch.

Lapsis will be available On Demand via Fantasia Film Festival’s website August 20th through September 2nd.