Anon (2018)

Anon is a film funded by Sky Cinema and currently showing in the UK on limited theatrical release and on Sky's movie channels.
I don't have access to Sky, but I did manage to catch this on the big(gish) screen - which probably helped my dodgy eyesight as it made the letters on screen a lot easier to read.

And there are a lot of letters on screen.

For video game players, there are familiar reference points. While in a game, hovering a cursor over an object or NPC (non-player character) will often bring up information about the object of focus, in Anon focusing on another person will bring up details of that person's history - a sort of instantaneous Linked In/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram search.

Everything the citizens of the world of Anon see is recorded too - recordings which people can chose to share, or which the police can access with people often acting as the witness to their own crimes.

It's a set-up that would probably fit right in with Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series. Only Black Mirror feels more cinematic than Anon ever manages to be.

There's nothing visually persuasive about the world that writer-director Andrew Niccol has created, the film is saturated with typical dystopian-grey; the characters that inhabit said world for the most part might as well have been cut from the same grey-cloth (Clive Owne delivering a typically Clive Owen-performance). It's a watchable enough piece, but when Brooker's series manages to be more visually compelling and more memorable, the film feels as if it's arrived ten-years too late on the scene.