User Reviews

I watched this on television under the title DE@TH ON LIVE. It's a broad satire of social media and reality television, set in a futuristic society in which every person now wears cameras concealed in contact lenses and many people's lives are broadcast online for the entertainment of the masses.

It's an interesting subject matter, but one that never really gels. This film features various diverse sub-plots that never really go anywhere. One girl's private life is constantly being spied upon while a former soldier investigates his brother's mysterious death and discovers it was broadcast online. The film flirts with a few first-person sequences and has a good opening car chase, but the mix of middling, unknown actors and confused plotting make the whole thing a real chore.

* Written following a screening at Bath Film Festival 2013 with Skype Q&A *

The title Channeling is deliberately multivalent, meaning both the sense of 'He channelled his energies into archery', and putting something on a channel (so that others can see it).

As director / writer Drew Thomas told us in answer to one of my questions, the family of whom Wyatt (Taylor Handley), Jonah (Dominic DeVore) and Ashleigh (Skyler Day) are the grown-up offspring is a dysfunctional one : one son travels from Yemen for a funeral, and is then (in his only real-time appearance) told off by the father for not being there in time.

With Ashleigh's confessional moment on camera, Thomas said that he had intended to portray a self-loathing that might lead someone to seek approval from ratings for their past or future actions or choices. When we saw this system of rating manipulated, and indeed the events that had led up to it, the film did seem momentarily insubstantial and trivial, but it moved away from it, and this was something, perhaps a little self-indulgently, that Thomas almost did throughout the film, mining genres for what they were worth before moving on, even at the risk of lacking cohesion.

Saying that, the dummy commercial that opens the film is funny, thought provoking, and satirical, with insights into where the world of Twitter, etc., logically lead to – it plunges one straight into a counterfactual world, but does not stray far from the things that we know in what it changes. The moments of humour characterize the film, although we are not always sure that it is permitted to laugh, and it also expects us to do some work in piecing together what has happened in and following the pursuit sequence that we see, where the early dialogue was hard to follow.

Not least since this is set in California and begins with a car chase, expectations of topping Drive (2011) spring to mind, but the excitement of the action on the road, and elsewhere, has been styled, Thomas told us, to be more like the era of Dirty Harry (1971) (he did not name that film) and film noir. Just in these things, there was already quite a mixture of feels, let alone with a gangland punishment (including a British-sounding baddie ?) that made one wonder if Thomas had equivalent scenes in Seven Psychopaths (2012) or In Bruges (2008) in his sights.

It remain unclear whether these disparate elements enhance or dissipate the film's energies, as it is all too true that many science-fiction films sticks to type, whereas Channeling shows off its director's film literacy. It also has an enviable soundtrack, making an impact right with the opening commercial, and even a live band in the night club reminiscent of The Doors.

Wyatt is not alone in his perilous exploits, for he has an accomplice (or whose side is she on ?) in Tara (Kate French). When Jonah tries to explore what his elder brother has been up to, Tara's allure is tangible, but her first reaction to Jonah using Wyatt's device and channel is hostile (a number of retorts to his attempts to speak, such as wishing him cancer).

Comparisons between the brothers are inevitable and deliberate, and, although we see that the professional soldier (Jonah) is tough, and can also drive, he is never going to be Wyatt (perhaps a pressure that he has always put on himself, helped by his father's attitude and actions).

Perhaps it is Tara's confusion, on all levels, that leads her to blow hot and cold towards Jonah, but she definitely starts by imputing blame : here, there seems to be a sort of fog of war about who people really are and who did what, which, in a digital age, when people do masquerade, and when the film explores the boundaries between what is real, what staged (and what predictable, what fixed), makes for even greater richness of reference.

The other question that I put forward was prompted by a film that teasingly plays with the question of free will versus determinism, The Game (1997) : I asked Thomas whether the technology of people sharing their actions and following their ratings, which the film initially seems to be about, had come first, or whether the deterministic theme had always been what interested him most. (It had, and he had wanted to explore the ways in which people do not (or refuse) to take responsibility for what concerns them, and had seen a link with how people in the US use the technology of social media to arrive at an answer based on what others tell them.

If that Doors tribute was deliberate, maybe it leads off in some other directions : Maybe not the advocacy of mescalin and other mind-altering substances, though, in the film, we see tablets of what turns out to be called Oxy crushed and then snorted as if it were coke, but using the edge of the pervasive sort of mini-tablet as a straight edge to line it up.

Perhaps the Warhol-type being famous for fifteen minutes, and just doing things to get a higher number of followers, is a sort of intoxicant or tranquillizer, not unlike Marx's 'opiate of the masses', not least when we see both what use the club bosses are putting participants' behaviour to and how they control it ? All in all, a thoughtful film, even if it may be too much of a rich blend of influences for the competing calls on our attention to allow us to settle down – though, since Thomas seems to have aimed at the feel that it has, and if it does still hold together, it may not be right (in a film about people taking responsibility) to imagine a film that he have made by suppressing some of those instincts

A contact lens allows people to broadcast their life live for viewers and sponsors. Wyatt (Taylor Handley) broadcasts his life as a stolen car racer with a hot girlfriend (Kate French). He is pursued and dies in an auto accident. His military brother Jonah (Dominic DeVore) returns home to avenge his death by pretending to be his brother, broadcasting illegal activity to gain an audience.

The film is for people who feel they are so important that the world wants to know every time they go out an eat a cheeseburger and they do. The production had a lot of "eye cam" first person viewing, but it wasn't exclusive, so the film wasn't as idiotic as "Hardcore Henry." The final conflict was very anti-climatic.

Guide: F-word. Brief sex and nudity.

First film from writer/director Drew Thomas set in the not too distant future where people have taken social media to a new level and broadcast their lives in real time through contact lenses which transmit to an app on their smartphones.

The film opens with an amusing advert in the style of real Google adverts. The below video was used in a viral marketing campaign and is not the actual one used in the film, but will give you an idea of what the film is centred around.

Doesn't seem so science-fiction now, does it? Maybe the not too distant future could even be next week! It does seem like the next logical, if not even more personal step up from blogs, youtube channels, reality TV and sharing of life moments on twitter and facebook.

The film starts with a car chase in which Wyatt Maddox (Taylor Handley) is driving accompanied with Tara (Kate French). We then later learn that this car chase ends fatally for Wyatt. The story then continues with Wyatt's soldier brother Jonah (Dominic Devore) returning home for the funeral. On discovering his brother's online existence under the channel name Wyld_Life, Jonah decides to pose as Wyatt and reawaken his channel in order to lure his killers.

Meanwhile, while the main story is unfolding there is a sub story in the form of Ashleigh Maddox (Skyler Day) the little sister of Wyatt and Jonah. She is at that impressionable high school age where having recognition and admiration from your peers seems like the most important thing to give you a sense of belonging. She is also a channeler and has her own fashion vlog. Here you see how she uses the vlog for online attention as she sits alone talking to herself in a mirror, but actually casting to thousands. She begins a relationship which she talks about and broadcasts through her channel. She later finds out that her boyfriend has been casting without her knowledge and during intimate times too.

Another sub story is about what people do to increase ratings, and therefore get sponsors to give them earning potential. Wyatt's angle was stealing cars, heightening his risk and also simultaneously boosting his ratings. Behind this are the sponsors which sell the advertising space on the casting channels to companies with a relevant product. Furthermore, this bred underground casinos where we saw the shadier side of being able to watch every moment of people's lives. Gamblers betted on people's life events in real time and long-term bets such as if a girl's pregnancy test would be positive or negative, and then if this led to abortion or keeping the baby.

This was an interesting film which shows the direction that social media could go and has gone in the past. From 2005 when Andrew Fischer auctioned his forehead for advertising space, to viral celebrity sex tapes, and the increased popularity of reality TV there definitely would be a market for what Channeling proposes the future of entertainment to be and our willingness to share more and more of our lives in order to get our 15 minutes of fame.

A Q&A session followed after the film, the distance between audience and director was approximately 5000 miles but through the wonders of Skype we heard the American accent of Drew Thomas as he sat in his car by a mountain in the glorious sunshine in California. Taking questions from the audience Drew said that he didn't feel that social media was to blame but that together with people it can be evil and pervasive. He showed this through the character of Ashley where he wanted to make the audience sympathise with her, however one festival audience member found her character annoying! But then I think that's how some people view social media, I find it particularly annoying when 'friends' of mine post every minute detail of their life – I definitely don't think I'll be tuning into livecasting channels in the near future, well, not unless they are doing something exciting…..

I enjoy films that make you think "has technology gone too far?" Channeling is a perfect example of this. Another example would be the film Her. What makes Channeling especially interesting is that the technology depicted here seems like it could happen in the very near future. This could very well be the next upgrade in social media. The part of the story involving Ashleigh (Skyler Day) made me think about how future generations of people seem to have less and less privacy in their lives. For example, today it's not uncommon to see a post on Facebook of a baby in the womb; that person was never given the choice of how present they want to be on social media. In Ashleigh's case, some of her most intimate moments were live broadcasted without her knowledge.

In addition to the thought provoking and sci-fi feel of the film, it also contains a fair amount of action (i.e. car chases), really drawing in the audience. Overall Drew Thomas does an excellent job with this movie. I highly recommend it.