Let's Be Evil movie review & film summary (2016)

Eventually Jenny gets situated, and meets her coworkers, or rather co-candidates—the appointment is for a job audition, and the job is “chaperoning” a group of academically gifted students enrolled in the Project’s Augmented Reality education program. This being the, or an, ostensible solution to the fat-kid problem the fellow in the opening scene was ranting about. All the participants in the program wear virtual reality glasses, and much of the film is shot via the point of view of the characters wearing the gizmos, which allows the frame to be filled with semi-fancy computer graphics and also means the cinematographer doesn’t have to make a lot of different lens choices. Jenny’s colleagues are Tiggs (Kara Tointon)—who prefers the diminutive to her given name, which is Antigone, and hold on, it gets worse—a perky/feisty young woman, and Darby (Eliot James Langridge), a guy with one of those au courant post-Nazi shaved-side haircuts who’s so surly and anti social it’s hard to believe he’d get past an interview for a gig mopping up at White Castle, but whatever. This trio’s challenge is to look after a group of busy-interacting-with-air (because augmented reality and everything) young geniuses, including one named Cassandra (Isabelle Allen). (I told you it gets worse.) Shepherding the recruits is Ariel (Jamie Bernadette), who’s kind of like Siri with a visual component.

All the ingredients are here, I guess, for an involving and tricky thriller in which actual reality opposes itself to computer-driven reality, not to mention all the potential for social commentary such a scenario engenders. David Cronenberg springs to mind, as do the post-nuke “special” children bred and trained in Joseph Losey’s early ‘60s “The Damned.” “Let’s Be Evil” does not get within swinging, spitting, or any kind of distance of those aforementioned films. There’s no reliable conceptual framework, no actual opposition between villain and protagonist, not much of anything but the computer graphics, the flickering lights and eventual blackouts and crawl-through-the-ventilation scares that worked a lot better in the likes of “Demons 2” than they do here. The movie’s relentless one-note tone makes its final twist, such as it is, entirely predictable and pat. I was surprised to see that this picture had an unrolling at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, where once upon a time pictures such as Christopher Nolan’s “Following” and Jonathan Weiss’ “The Atrocity Exhibition” unspooled. Standards are sinking everywhere these days, it seems.