INCONTROL – a film by Kurtis David Harder – SPOILERS ⁓

Samantha J Collins (Anja Savcic) is a mousey intellectual with an allergy to peanuts. She has a crush on Mark (Levi Meaden) who is romantically attached to Marissa (Sarah Troyer), and though the story sometimes seems like a love triangle with high-tech complications, it is much more than that.

In the opening scene Marissa wrecks her car, and everything else might be an elaborate explanation of why that happens.

“We don’t consider the impact of allowing people to know everything about us,” says Sam’s (unnamed) professor. “Voyeurism has taken on a whole new meaning. With the advent of technology, we need to explore not how, but why, we act the way we do. I have your papers ready. Most of you were on the right track, but some of you have to stop providing answers and start asking more questions.” Sam gets a C minus for her essay on how the idea of The Panopticon relates to disappearing privacy in the modern world.

Unhappy with the grade, Sam asks Mark for help with a re-write, and he does, but not in the way she expects. He introduces Sam to a device that modifies her own behaviour in a way that illustrates how the Panopticon concept relates to the Professor’s assignment. Then she re-submits herself, and yes, that needs some clarification.

Mark and two of his friends, Victor (Rory J. Saper) and Jenny (Shayla Stonechild), familiarize Sam with a device they claim to have stolen from the university. The device allows the user to enter the mind of another person – to perceive what they perceive and to exercise some control over what they do – but it does not allow them to access the other person’s memories, and the host is entirely unaware of the invader’s presence. Sam quickly becomes addicted to the process, using the device to further her already well-developed obsession with Marissa, a cheerleader who is not at all mousey, and has the life that Sam wants.

The group uses Jenny’s apartment as a base of operations, but Jenny seems mysteriously detached from everyone else, and we learn little about her.

A man is killed while Victor is occupying his mind, and this experience gives Victor a new and very suspicious outlook on life. He decides to get far away from everyone in the group because he suddenly believes he is being controlled by someone. (There is a distance limitation on the mind control device, so he plans to take a boat far enough away to be out of range.) He might be paranoid, but he also could be right. Since no one is conscious of being controlled by another unless the controller wants them to be, any of the characters in the film might be being controlled at any time by anyone with access to the device.

It is not clear how Mark finds out where to find Victor, but Sam saw Victor talking with a strange person on the street, so she might have pointed him in the right direction. Mark’s paranoid behaviour seems to echo that of Victor, whom he locates and kills. At that moment in the film, one easily leaps to the (possibly incorrect) conclusion that Mark’s controller is Sam.

Several murders and a suicide later, all users of the mind-control device are dead, and the device is taken away by persons unknown in an unmarked truck. But questions remain. What exactly is transmitted by the mind-control device? Is it the electromagnetic essence of self? Can two or more people enter the mind of one host simultaneously? If so, would they be aware of each other?

The group has a rule against taking control of anyone with whom one has a personal involvement. Does Sam violate that rule? Does she, perhaps, pop into the mind of her agoraphobic mother (Valerie Planche) to try some internal therapy? She can’t access her mother’s memories, but she might make changes in some of her mom’s behavioural patterns if she worked at it.

Can two minds co-exist in the same brain? After Melissa recovers from the injuries she sustained in the car crash, she signs up for the same course of study Sam was taking. When she visits her doctor for an update on her condition, Sam’s mother is working as a receptionist in the doctor’s office.

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INCONTROL can be streamed on TUBI, and is available on DVD.

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** — Revised. Originally published 21 January 2018