In the latter half of the 2010s, "it's like an episode of Black Mirror" has replaced "it's like Philip K. Dick" as the hackiest, laziest way you can describe any work of science fiction. But Anon courts that comparison more vigorously than most. Not just because it's a satiric treatment of contemporary social ills in the form of a fantastic sci-fi technology; because it seems pretty damn close to certain that this story would have been far more satisfying if writer-director Andrew Niccol had been compelled to fit it all within 50 minutes, instead of indulgently permitting himself exactly twice that length.

The setting is a future an unclear while away from ours, with a magic technology and everything else that looks pretty much exactly the way it does right now. Everybody has eye implants which are (officially? colloquially?) known as "Mind's Eye", permitting a constant stream about all the data you could possibly need to know about every object, and more importantly, every human, you ever look at. Moreover, Mind's Eye records everything you look at, so there is a recording of every solitary action you see during the day, recorded right there in your brain. This of course means that privacy and anonymity are dead as dead could be, and it also means that crime is functionally non-existent; if the cops can simply download you performing whatever illegal act you were up to, there's very little reason to keep on doing it.

Because of this, it's a bit shocking when a serial killer starts murdering people, with no apparent connection between the victims other than they are doing things that are technically legal but probably not very socially desirable. Moreover, this killer is a genius hacker, apparently; when the cops download the video feed from the victims, they discover that the killer was able to hack their own vision into the victims' Mind's Eye, meaning that a) the victims watched themselves get killed, and b) there's absolutely no hint of who the killer was. This is one of two major annoyances in the life of Detective Sal Friedland (Clive Owen); the other is that he has on a couple of occasions crossed paths with a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) who, somehow, does not seem to have any online identity, a theoretical impossibility in this day and age. This being a movie and all, it leaps to his mind as well as ours that she's undoubtedly connected to the crimes, possibly by virtue of being the one doing the killing.

A murder mystery investigating the implications of the technologies of the modern day, extended to a wild but not inherently implausibly exaggerated state; that sounds like an Andrew Niccol film to me. This was, after all, the stuff of his debut as both writer and director, 1997's excellent Gattaca, which sought to do for genetic manipulation what Anon hopes to do for Facebook. 21 years later, that film remains a genre masterwork and I live in perpetual hope that it will someday find the widespread acclaim it deserves. Time alone will tell if Anon manages to hang on for 21 years, though I do have my extremely strong doubts. It's not that the film's fancifully paranoid thoughts about the anti-privacy of modern internet usage are off-base; it's more that the vessel containing those thoughts does them absolutely no favors whatsoever. Part of this, I am very sorry to say, is because of Niccol's writing; he is guilty of that very worst of the polemicist's sins, presenting an extremely obvious harangue and then somehow managing to believe that actually, he hasn't been direct enough, and so ends the film with a sluggish scene of Owen and Seyfried baldly mouthing out the film's themes some of the worst-written dialogue I've heard in 2018.

Then again, if Anon ended with a scene that was not sluggish, it would be very lonely. Breaking the plot down into what actually happens, there's really not very much of it. It takes ages and ages for that plot to happen, though: by the thirty-minute mark, it's not even clear yet that Seyfried's character exists, and she's got second billing. Instead, Niccol is leaning heavily on two things: atmosphere, and exposition-through-demonstration. Both of which I approve of in principle, but Anon is a beastly slow, almost unwatchably somber thing. Mind's Eye is definitely a weird technology that needs some exposition, but not nearly as much as Anon gives it: we get the same sequence of a killing followed by the cops being befuddled by the discovery that the killer replaced the victim's feed followed by a reiteration of the notion that in this future world, there is no anonymity, no fewer than three times, before Niccol has decided that we probably get it, and can move on to the actual movie.

The film also trips over its feet almost in the first scene and never, ever recovers at the level of how Mind's Eye works. So what happens is, we get many first-person scenes, in the HD ratio of 1.78:1, where we see all the digital readouts that whomever (generally Sal) sees. And we also get many third person scenes, in anamorphic widescreen, 2.35:1. This back-and-forth starts basically the moment the film does, and it is motherfucking tiring. The Mind's Eye POV shots are so busy! It's a very cool visual conceit that almost immediately goes from "neat thing" to a "a horrible distraction", especially because so many of the POV shots are fully unnecessary. The way I see it, Anon could have gone two ways: entirely first-person, though not always the same person; or mostly third-person with POV shots used at dramatically salient moments to really bring home for us the nature of this futuristic world. As it is, it feels unfocused and needlessly showy.

The other big aesthetic misstep is the film's claustrophobic, suffocating reliance on a greyed-out color palette. This is, maybe, the greyest movie I have ever seen that wasn't actually monochromatic, not just because of the extreme desaturation that was obviously applied in post-production, but because of how much of the set and costume design is also grey: conservative suits everywhere you look, and every fucking space is bare concrete, from the police station to apartment hallways to just, like, outside. I'm sure Niccol had something in mind about depersonalisation and the lifeless future we're heading to and some such thing, but it is still just awful to look at: it is, literally, exhaustingly grey. The great pity is that Amir Mokri's cinematography is otherwise quite stylish and lovely: great compositions using the jarring lines of the sets to great effect, crystal-clear but chilly cityscapes that cram characters into the corner of the huge wide frame. If it is possible to say that a film with some of the most upsetting color correction that I've ever seen is still beautifully-shot, Anon is. It's just so fucking grey.

The greyness, the slowness, and the pound-on-the-head writing are all enough to consign Anon to the abyss, which is too bad; you can see where the wonderful old Niccol is hiding just inside this film. Still, it's just a damn boring movie to watch, on top of being hectoring, and that's the worst combination. Some things are good: Owen's face had gotten interestingly weathered and craggy at some point when I wasn't looking, and so he remains always interesting to look at. Seyfried actually gives a good performance, despite playing a role specifically designed to be free of personality or background: there's a harsh, angry coldness that she brings to cut through the film and Sal's bullshit, in ways that I found very bracing. Christophe Beck's droning score, which remains mostly away from the forefront of the soundtrack but always putters away in the background, is a terrifically moody thing, achieving in music what I think all that damn grey was attempting to achieve in the visuals. And... nope, I think that actually taps me out for nice things to say. Still, by the standards of Netflix sci-fi (its native Great Britain is the only place in the world where it's actually getting a theatrical release), this at least has thoughts in its head, and is therefore above average. Goddamn Netflix sci-fi.