Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi thriller, set in a nervy near future in which all personal information is immediately accessible and memories are digitised and vulnerable to tampering, feels uncomfortably timely. It’s not such a massive leap to go from the mining of social networking profiles for political and commercial purposes to the complete and obligatory lack of privacy that is the norm in Anon. But the tone-deaf execution of the film – all flat-line delivery and awkward pauses – rather undermines the intelligence of the premise.
It’s particularly disappointing because, in star Clive Owen and writer-director Andrew Niccol, Anon boasts alumni from two of the more intriguing sci-fi films of the past couple of decades. But Anon lacks the sleek economy of Niccol’s calling card debut, Gattaca. And Owen, so robustly present in the lead role in Children of Men, seems curiously disengaged here. Owen plays Sal Frieland, a detective in a world where all crimes are solvable thanks to ubiquitous surveillance. Then he meets a woman (Amanda Seyfried) who, according to his data, doesn’t exist. The fact that she does is a threat to the state’s jealously guarded control of the population. And soon people start dying. Unfortunately, Niccol gets bogged down in impenetrable tech speak and paranoia long before a credible motive for murder is established.
