SXSW Review: ‘Lapsis’ Critiques Broken Systems of the American Workforce
In Lapsis’ dystopian future, the gig economy has run amuck, health care costs are exorbitant, and the digital divide has never been greater. For Ray Tincelli, it just means getting by one day at a time. As a currier delivering lost airplane luggage, he’s not bringing in enough money to pay for advanced medical treatments needed for his ailing younger brother. In a last ditch effort, he picks up ‘cabling,’ a job in the gig economy that involves connecting quantum computers across forested terrain. It promises quick easy money, but as he soon finds out, the spoils promised by corporate America, to him and his other contract workers, don’t come without strings attached.
Lapsis has a clever setup. Without heavy exposition, it lays down the foundation of its sci-fi dystopia with clarity. It doesn’t take much to understand concepts like cabling because it feels like a natural extension of where we’re currently at. This future dystopia isn’t like that of say Minority Report, but rather the near future, ten or so years from now, and as such, the film doesn’t need to over explain concepts. It has a pick and go nature to it where you aren’t stuck wadding through exposition or made up concepts, a strength in the realm of science-fiction.
Because of it, the depiction of Lapsis’s critiques are more closely aligned with its real life targets. Gig economy workers with no benefits. A health care system that is profit oriented. The inability to access the internet at home because of income levels. Corporate greed putting profits over people. Sound familiar? These are all facts of life in 2020 as they are in Lapsis, and they make up the wholistic social commentary writer director Noah Hutton is after. At times it is clever, depicting these abuses through actions on the trail. Other times, it can feel artificial, particularly when moments of grandstanding spell out the plights of the system to Ray.
The film deflates when it reaches its end and has to wrap everything up as quickly as it can. After a climactic build up that sees the workers unifying (essentially unionizing) for a stand off with the corporation, the film resolves swiftly and with minimal conflict. The workers gather in a tent, deploy their digital trojan horse with ease, and the fallout appears as a news clip about the corporation’s difficulties financially. The friction underpinning the film was pointing towards a revolt, or at least material changes to the working conditions, but the film just ends — either intentionally written, or, as I may suspect, a limitation of scope. A stymied workers union revolt aside, three-fourths of the film maintains a critical eye for contemporary issues facing the workforce. In the age of the coronavirus when workers benefits, contract labor, and corporate profits are debated more than ever, Lapsis is an admirable science-fiction approach to the issues we face here and now.
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