‘Latency’ Review – A Mindless And Toothless Psychological ‘Ready Player One’ Clone

We can’t review Latency without talking about leading actress Sasha Luss, since it’s been a while since audiences have heard that name. The Russian model turned actress was infamous several years ago for being the unhealthy obsession of filmmaker Luc Besson.

If you guys don’t remember the story, Besson was the subject of several #MeToo allegations, including sexual assault and sexual harassment that were later dropped. As Besson tried to beat the allegations, Luss became a personal muse for him — writing, directing, and producing her 2019 film Anna, a film that sees Luss in many compromising positions as she sleeps with every character who gets at least five minutes of runtime.

It was like the director got off watching other dudes have sex with her, knowing that he probably couldn’t. Since then, both Besson and Sasha’s careers have been on ice. Sasha hadn’t been in much over the last five years until her name resurfaced in Latency, Lionsgate’s latest film.

Latency is a film about a Hana, a young woman who suffers from a crippling mental disorder that leaves her unable to leave her apartment. As a result, she decides to be a test monkey for a brand new piece of technology that links her brain to a computer. Hana’s only friend Jen is the only person she can rely on to get things from the outside world.

As Hana begins to calibrate her brain with the equipment, she gets an odd request to inflict pain upon herself in order to complete the process. She begins to imagine things and people inside her apartment that aren’t there. As time goes on, Hana begins to lose her ability to distinguish between reality and virtual reality. Things get even worse when her condition leads her to become a prisoner of her room and her mind.

With the fast progression of AI in recent years, Hollywood is primed to have several stories about the abuse of technology as a vehicle for psychological horror. While Latency is a great idea, it accompanies terrible execution. The movie is a 90-minute bottle film where the entire setting is the small apartment of our main character.

Hana is a girl who is mentally crippled by the idea of leaving her apartment and being around people, so this turns her into the equivalent of a Twitch streamer who spends 20 hours a day online and never leaves the house. The setup is definitely makes for an interesting film, but Latency does not have anything more to offer outside of a basic premise.

The girl allows a software company she is not familiar with to gain a ridiculous amount of access to her mind. When she begins to see and hear things that may or may not be there, she downward spirals into insanity. The problem here is that Latency does not give you a clear indication of what is happening in the story.

Is the software company taking over her mind and forcing her to do things she doesn’t want to do? The film is not clear. Is the girl’s mental illness causing her to see horrific sights that have been and amplified by the software? The film is not clear. Is Hana just nuts and she’s just going around killing people due to her insanity? The film is not clear.

Sasha Luss has never been known for her acting ability, but she does a solid job being the protagonist of this film. Her best friend in the movie — played by social media influencer Alexis Ren — has a bright personality, but the character is wasted and tossed aside in the movie after the first act.

Latency doesn’t know what it wants to be and it’s not defined enough to even offer a good discussion of what the point in the movie is. Is this a commentary on video games, social media influencers, artificial intelligence, or just a story about untreated mental illness?

The second half completely falls apart, taking the whole movie with it. Any entry that the film had in it premise dies by becoming a confusing thriller that lacks direction and excitement. A low budget effort, given the production and the stars behind it, but having a low budget did not excuse a bad story. Sasha gives one of her best performances so far, which isn’t saying much given her resume is fairly short.

With a dull story and a piss poor ending, Latency misses the window of being a meaningful thriller — a movie that drags you around for a ride but leaves you disappointed at the final destination.

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