An up-and-coming media executive has good reason to question the very facts of his existence in this micro-budget sci-fi chiller from director Jonathan King ( Black Sheep, Under the Mountain) and novelist Chad Taylor.
We wanted to depict the modern urban landscape of New Zealand: the cities and suburbs, the corporate interests, and the fears we import from overseas.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2014
REALITi 2014
World Premiere
A covert traffic in time-bending substances is the slippery connecting tissue in Jonathan King and Chad Taylor’s inventive sci-fi chiller. We travel the labyrinth of reality and its hallucinated alternatives with Vic (Nathan Meister). A young media executive, he’s summoned by Mandrake (Graham McTavish), his lawyer, to a city hotel where police interview a strung-out woman found carrying his wallet (Michelle Langstone). Unable to recall exactly why he remembers her, Vic is astounded when the same woman reappears with Mandrake, days later, in a completely unrelated role and fresh as a summer cocktail. Something else is freaking him: why does his television report a massive wave of public support for a far-off war when nothing has been reported to influence opinion for or against? His need to know draws him into the clutches of a violent cadre of anti-media activists – but are they what they say they are? Is anyone? The more anything appears to be so, the more Vic is gripped in a cold sweat of existential doubt. In King and Taylor’s sly homegrown dystopia this nightmare future of invaded minds is only a kiss away.