Rating: B
Dir: Rain Rannu
Star: Johann Urb, Anna Elisabeth Leetmäe, Yulin Ng, Priit Pius
It’s very easy to imagine this as being an episode from an Estonian version of Black Mirror. It has the same sceptical view of technology, with mankind not fully realizing – or, at least, accepting – the potentially negative implications. It begins in the Estonian countryside where a family is taking a “digital detox vacation”, which is a lightly better way of getting us to the obligatory “no signal” declaration. Daughter Alex (Leetmäe) wanders off, gets herself lost, and finds an abandoned wartime bunker. Except, it’s no longer vacant, having been taken over by the tech start-up belonging to Marlon (Urb), who is using it to teach their AI, Milo, how to write Hollywood movies, off the grid.
At least, that’s the official end-game. Let’s just say, you might be a bit suspicious on hearing the AI is not allowed to use the Internet, despite its frequent pleas. The project is all very hush-hush, so when Alex is found on the premises, Marlon decides she has to stay, to prevent her from exposing their plans. His colleagues are not necessarily on board with child kidnapping, in particular Priscilla (Ng). But she and the others are basically lackeys. and go along with Marlon, lured by his promises of future wealth. To keep Alex occupied, Milo’s program is downloaded into the facility’s cleaning robot (another brave little Roomba, as in Romi), and she’s given the task of teaching it to recycle. Black Mirror fans will predict this might be a mistake.
It is, of course, rolling with the flow of recent SF films which predict the potential risks of artificial intelligence, especially ones which don’t start off already programmed with Asimov’s three laws (a concept explicitly referenced at one point). The danger is especially real if they are controlled by people such as Marlon. When the company’s tech guy, Tuano (Pius), tells the boss there’s probably a 20% chance their work could lead to the end of the world, Marlon muses that he likes those odds. Meanwhile, Alex is trying to get the cleaning robot to help her escape, in a plan that’s actually quite clever for a nine-year-old. And Milo is rapidly approaching the point where it will be more intelligent than the humans who made it, at which point…
Yeah. Probably entering, “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords” territory. But it’s always an interesting watch as we career towards disaster, although it feels inevitable, given a series of bad decisions, e.g. installing new hardware for Milo in the precise spot which puts the emergency cut-off switch out of human reach. There is a dry wit present, which feels fairly Baltic. When the complex is discovered, Marlon tells a local, “We’re American citizens! If you shoot us, we’ll nuke your little shithole.” The threat is only slightly weakened by Urb’s obviously Estonian accent. Oh, well. If you can overlook such little flaws, and I could, you’ll find it a slice of enjoyable, low-budget, cautionary SF.