Director (also co-writer) Benjamin Dickinson’s recently released film, Creative Control, is one of few movies over the past several years to take recent technological advances seriously, inasmuch as the technology isn’t far from what we already have. The filmmakers have said that the setting is New York, “5 minutes in the future”.

In Creative Control’s case the technology is like a better version of Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, HoloLens. The difference is it looks just like a pair of glasses (think Google Glass) while the interface is completely gesture-controlled. But the holographic images we see created are not unlike what we’ve seen from HoloLens. You don’t have to suspend much belief to see Creative Control as a possible future scenario.

The film centers around a rather overly-hip advertising agency in Williamsburg, New York – referred to in the film as an “emotional Afghanistan” – where a new and possibly world-changing augmented reality device (Augmenta) has been put in the hands of ad exec, David, played by the director, Dickinson.

Only David, after facing some relationship difficulties with his yoga instructor girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), quickly realizes that creating your own holograms can help when one is in dire need of a partner. He already has a crush on Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), the girlfriend of his friend, Wim, (Dan Gill). Wim is an eccentric photographer who is perhaps much cooler than David – in an environment where being cool means everything. Using the “imagine recapture” feature on his Augmenta device, David recreates Sophie as a holographic image. At this point, and almost always naked, this hologram is David’s property to do with as he pleases. From here, things take a take a turn for the worse.

Bad environments

This dystopian vision of people becoming too involved with their gadgets is now perhaps becoming a little clichéd, but Creative Control’s intelligent dialogue, acerbic humor, and broody black and white photography make it quite an advanced take on life in the technological fast lane. All the time during the yoga scenes we hear about “expanding our awareness”, and when we hear about Augmenta we are told about this fantastic, magic, product that will change the way we live. None of which really happens. It seems the film’s message, or one of its messages, is that technology, or yoga, or even advanced feel-good medications, won’t do much for how gratified we feel in the world.

The backdrop to all of this are a few seemingly tepidly satisfied people in highly pretentious work settings speaking bombastically about the future – at the same time scoffing down handfuls of good-looking anti-depressant medications. Nothing seems quite right in this gentrified world of bright, young yuppies.

Neutral technologies

In this respect the film works as a satire on the modern version of cool – depicted as either worshiping technology, or finding a higher form of consciousness through yoga. Creative Control’s dim view of digital immersion goes hand-in-hand with Spike Jonze’s virtual-girlfriend nightmare, Her, as a kind of sensual counterpart to the latter that dealt more with the attraction of mere words. While machines arguably won’t be learning so fast to see anything as advanced as Her in the near future, the possibility of a very sexually attractive holographic image coming into our bedrooms at night is probably not that far away.

It’s been said the film explores the dark-side of augmented reality, but Dickinson himself has stated that the technology is of course neutral. Creative Control is satirizing culture, the products in themselves are harmless in good hands. If the film is dark in any way it’s not because people are (obviously) going to get off on virtual or augmented reality devices, but because this might be all we use them for, at bedtime, before we take a couple of sleeping pills, before we head to our ‘creative work-space’ the next day, before we turn on our device again. Creative Control is not demonizing technology, it’s bashing the consumerist ethos, our addiction to fulfilling our desires in a very modern, if not too distant setting.

It’s also very funny.

Creative Control will be available to stream on Amazon May 12^th.

Photo credit: Magnolia Pictures