LEVELS – a film by Adam Stern – (speculative recap) ⁓

Joe’s smart apartment (voiced by Amanda Tapping) wakes him at 7am. The camera pans across Joe’s bookshelves, and the only conspicuous volume is “Dead Time” by Stephen White, a book in which a psychologist investigates the disappearance of the surrogate mother of his ex-wife’s child. “You have several items on your calendar for today,” says the house. “You have a request from Ash’s assistant. Coffee at Old World Roasters at 9:30am.”

A flashback shows how Joe (Peter Mooney) first met his girlfriend Ash (Cara Gee). She pops into his bookstore, examines the cover and binding of a random book and says “beautiful detail”. Then she asks him out for coffee. On their way to the coffee shop, we catch a snippet of their conversation. “So you’ve read that stuff,” she says, and he responds with a quote from Immanuel Kant: “Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness thing, in vain and have no final purpose.”

She orders a cappuccino, and tells Joe she loves him and needs to tell him something about himself. Before she can do that, she is shot dead by a man we will later learn is Anthony Hunter (Aaron Abrams). Joe is devastated, and doesn’t leave his apartment for weeks. Oliver (David Hewlett), who runs a the newsstand down the street, brings Joe coffee (of all things), but Joe isn’t interested.

After a while Joe goes to a pawn shop and buys a gun, but when he tries to shoot himself the gun doesn’t work. It works fine, though, when he points it anywhere else. He tries falling out the window but something catches him and he wakes in his bed the next morning with both himself and the window undamaged. The gun is still on the table.

Oliver’s newsstand is called Anachronistic News, and the sign says it was established in 2050.

A phone message from Ash tells him there is a special order package waiting for him at his bookstore. He agrees to get it, and we see that three people are monitoring him from a remote location. The special order is “On Being Human” by C S Lewis, or perhaps a discussion of it. Inside the cover, Ash has written: “For my J. The most real thing in my life. Love A.”

Part of Lewis’ poem seems relevant, though it is not mentioned in the film.

“They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang –can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.”

One of those monitoring Joe is Emma Bellamy (Jade Ma), and she gives orders to “take him down.” and “Retrieve whatever that is.” Two men try to do that, and Joe kills them with the gun he bought to kill himself, leaving one dead body inside his apartment and the other in the hallway. Then Ash phones, and the dead gunmen vanish. “I didn’t mean to be mysterious,” she says, “but it took me a while to hack a connection. And time works a bit differently here. Where I’m from. There’s The technology. It’s almost impossible to get access, but I did.”

“I saw you die,” says Joe. “I saw somebody kill you.”

Ash, whose last name is Solway, explains that after rapid leaps in artificial intelligence and machine learning, intelligence agencies and other special interests saw where the tech could go, and recruited the best people in software design. One such person was Anthony Hunter who worked for a large company called Sentech, gathering as much information from the real world as possible (in much the same way that Artificial Intelligence engines are doing currently). On the side Hunter was trying to incorporate all of this data into a true virtualized reality. With the help of another coder (whom Joe recognizes as Oliver Cox from the newsstand) Hunter succeeds and uses his virtual universe to test things, often to the detriment of the people living there.

Ash was trying to shut down Hunter’s illegal operations, but now she isn’t. In a later conversation with Oliver she says, “I saw what I saw. What it was. It wouldn’t have been right to shut it down, or let Hunter restart it. These are people.”

Despite its philosophical undertones, this is an excellent action thriller. Intense chase sequences and fight scenes lead to an ultimate confrontation that does not disappoint. (And in which Bellamy favours us with unexpected heroics.) Oliver vanishes, but there is some question as to whether any of the characters actually die.

Hunter certainly brings Doctor Frankenstein to mind, and makes one wonder whether, with modern technology, his creation might not be a monster. Mary Shelley wrote in the Author’s Introduction to the 1831 edition of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Premetheus”: “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

“It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor‐simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Reality may thus contain many levels.”
— Nick Bostrom

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LEVELS can be streamed on HULU and on AMC+, and is available on Blu-ray.

The LEVELS soundtrack can be streamed on most music services, including Amazon and Apple.