LifeHack Review: Cybercrime Flick Never Escapes the Small Screen

Screens within screens within screens: thus is seemingly the fate of cinema, with viewers catching fragments of narrative in one of several competing windows. Sometimes that’s even a deliberate plan by the filmmakers. LifeHack, which debuted at South by Southwest last year, is the latest such screen life escapade from producer Timur Bekmambetov. After helping popularize such Zoom-style films as producer of Unfriended, through crime drama Searching and its sequel, Missing, and his own addition to the subgenre as a director, the politically-tinged Profile, he’s clearly trying to pull what he used to dub screen reality out of the horror corner. This newest film goes in a fresh direction, with first-time feature director Ronan Corrigan using the format for a cyberheist.

It’s a natural pairing, an online story about an online crime, and it also helps deal with the same question that vexes all found-footage-affiliated films: Why do the characters never turn the camera off? In the case of British teen Kyle (Georgie Farmer, Wednesday) and his friends, it’s because they’re perennially online, with the webcam always streaming. This lifestyle doesn’t pay off, as shown in the opening scene in which an imprisoned Kyle is pleading with the authorities. He’s not begging for parole, but instead to get his internet access back, which is the first sign that his online hacking scheme has blown up in his face.

Kyle’s misfortune stems from fleecing tech billionaire Don Heard (veteran British onscreen hardman Charlie Creed-Miles, Peaky Blinders, Nil by Mouth, Harry Brown). He’s already conned Heard’s daughter, wannabe Instagram influencer and model Lyndsey (Jessica Reynolds, Kneecap), and that’s how he gets dragged into a multimillion-dollar scheme to empty his crypto wallets.

Kyle is what’s known as a script kiddie, a wannabe hacker whose skill set only extends as far as downloading existing code and wreaking a little bit of havoc for the lulz. He’s egged on by his transatlantic trio of friends, fellow Brit Sid (Roman Hayeck-Green) and their American pals, Petey (James Vinh Scholz) and Alex (Yasmin Finney, Heartstopper). Not that geography really matters: Even if they all lived next door to each other they’d never actually meet, instead wallowing in their digital life and mourning absentee parents.

Of the four, the only one with anything like a personality is Alex, the sole female fitting the mold of the cool but sensitive tech-savvy girl – basically, contemporary cinema’s replacement for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s inevitably who Kyle is pining over, and in the one moment in which location matters, she’s the one who must take this online plan offline when it requires an IRL incursion into Heard’s office to access his laptop.

It’s a necessary turn, as watching a bunch of teens scream at each other as they post code and play online first person shooter games inevitably gets old. But then again, Alex’s adventure is shot like an FPS, a knowing joke that doesn’t have much of a punchline.

It’s an inevitable problem with the screenlife format, to find a way to keep this deluge of pop-ups and cutaways all interesting without the audience’s POV ever leaving a desktop screen. The script by Corrigan and Hope Elliott Kemp is a by-the-numbers crime caper, with these amateurs getting caught up in their own hubris and trying to get the upper hand once again. Corrigan and Kemp attempt to create some contemporary resonances, with the Heard character clearly drawing on Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, but little of it has any real resonance. Maybe it’s time for screenlife storytelling to get a hard reboot.

LifeHack

2025, R, 96 mins. Directed by Ronan Corrigan. Starring Georgie Farmer, Charlie Creed-Miles, Jessica Reynolds, Roman Hayeck-Green, James Vinh Scholz, Yasmin Finney

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

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