Netflix’s next sci-film, Anon, could not be arriving at a better time. Conversations about how social media companies pillage and sell our data has dominated news channels this month, in response to the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. Anon imagines a world in which everyone’s lives and memories are recorded by the government 24/7. So it makes the detective work of Sal Friedland, played by Clive Owens, incredibly easy. That is until he meets a young woman who lives off the grid. Played by Amanda Seyfried, the mysterious young girl begins to hack into Sal’s mind and mess up his sense of what is reality and what is simulation.
Director Andrew Niccol (who also made Gattaca) says data and our control of it was very much on his mind while creating Anon. “The reason I made the film is because I always wanted to do a movie about privacy and the fact that there was never a war for privacy, because we already lost — we gave away our privacy without a fight, all for convenience,” Andrew Niccol told Entertainment Weekly. “ Anon kind of takes that conflict to its logical conclusion. We are already lifelogging in our own way and becoming slightly biotech or syn-bio, because we’ve all got these phones in our hands and basically documenting our lives.”
It’s impossible not to get Black Mirror vibes from Anon. The thriller most closely matches up to the Netflix series’ season four “Crocodile” episode, where a character commits a murder and tries to stop an insurance company from scanning her memories. Anon takes this dystopian, but deeply realistic, idea one step further by imagining a world where not participating in technology and data collection is dangerously powerful and subversive. You can stream the timely sci-fi film on Netflix starting May 4.