David Caffrey

Sky Atlantic/NOW TV

Ěý

IN RECENT years, big corporations have made it their business to keep a close eye on developments in artificial intelligence. From predicting trends in markets to planning risk-mitigation strategies, companies are constantly on the lookout for new ways to capitalise on AI to stay ahead of the game.

The Fear Index, a four-part psychological thriller based on Robert Harris’s 2011 bestselling novel of the same name, explores the ethical and moral issues wrapped up in applying AI to business, and asks some pertinent questions about the morality of using scientific advances for the sole purpose of making money.

Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, The Black Dahlia) stars as Alex Hoffman, a wealthy technology entrepreneur who invents an AI-driven system capable of predicting how human fear affects behaviour and how that, in turn, affects fluctuations of the world’s financial markets. This knowledge promises not only power, but also considerable returns for Alex’s multibillionaire clients.

Directed by David Caffrey (Peaky Blinders, The Alienist), the series also stars Line of Duty alum Arsher Ali as Alex’s best friend and business partner Hugo, alongside Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) as Alex’s wife Gabby.

The action covers an intense 24-hour period in which Alex, a former scientist at the CERN particle physics laboratory, prepares to launch his morally questionable money-spinner. “Humans act in very predictable ways when they are frightened,” he assures his wealthy investors.

Yet, having promised billions in profit to his already rich clients, Alex’s plans are thrown into chaos when he is attacked by an unknown assailant at the home he shares with Gabby the night before the launch, leaving him disoriented and confused.

The next day, acting increasingly erratically and struggling to keep on top of things, Alex and Hugo don’t quite get the launch day they had in mind. It doesn’t help that an unexpected tragedy prompts some of their employees to start to question the morality of the whole endeavour.

Meanwhile, Alex becomes convinced that mysterious forces are conspiring to frame him for a series of acts he has no memory of having carried out. Questioned by the police and deserted by his wife, Alex finds himself in free fall, no longer sure what is real and what is happening only in the darkest corners of his imagination.

The Fear Index takes us not only into the mind of a man in a mental health crisis, but also provides a glimpse into a world where billions are made and spent in seconds, and where whole economies can be derailed by the timely use of a mathematical equation.

Caffrey adds a faint air of sci-fi and mystery to the proceedings, and ultimately delivers a gripping and robust thriller in which nothing is quite what it seems. A series of red herrings are peppered throughout the story to keep viewers on their toes. These add a note of suspense to the narrative but, to my mind, the series works best when viewed as a psychological drama about a man struggling to cope with psychosis as his life falls apart.

Although clearly made with fans of Line of Duty – the BBC’s long-running cop show – in mind, The Fear Index sadly lacks its punchiness and accessibility. With a screenplay filled with overly melodramatic exchanges and jarring technical jargon, the series often feels confusing and needlessly meandering. Still, Hartnett delivers a phenomenal turn and is the best thing about this flawed, yet highly watchable, mystery.

Wyatt Rockefeller

Everything seems to be going well for the three-person crew of a ship on a two-year voyage to Mars and back. For her very last mission, commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette) has been tasked with transporting biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) and medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) to their new base in Mars where they are expected to conduct some valuable research.

Things take a turn for the unexpected when the crew discovers an interloper onboard a few hours after launch. The man in question is Michael (Shamier Anderson), a launch support technician who found himself trapped inside the ship just before take off.

Stowaway, a Netflix produced space thriller from writer-director Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison, tells the story of this crew who soon face an impossible choice.

Injured and visibly shaken by his ordeal, Michael begs the commander to turn the ship around and take him back home where he is the sole guardian for his younger sister, but soon starts to accept that he is onboard for the long haul. On closer inspection, it transpires that Michael had accidentally damaged the ship’s vital carbon dioxide scrubber. With oxygen levels depleted and zero probability of making it back to Earth as a foursome, a decision must be made about what to do with Michael, but not everyone is onboard with what is being suggested.

Penna and Morrison present a deeply compelling, believable and handsomely acted thriller. With some nail-biting dramatic moments and an inspired “what if” idea, Stowaway manages to avoid the pitfalls that similarly themed productions have suffered from. And while the obligatory suspenseful spacewalks are perhaps less impressive than those in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity or more recently The Midnight Sky, there is still a commendable philosophical thread running through the film’s narrative that makes up for any other shortcomings.

Questions about sacrifice and the value of a life are asked, but even though they are never fully answered, there is a sense that Penna and Morrison have examined the film’s brilliantly nuanced premise from every possible angle and have in turn given us an inspired narrative that is bound to provoke discussion.

The film also manages to ask some pertinent questions around the value of scientific progress and whether it is important to pursue research to the detriment of human life. Furthermore, we are asked to put a value on an existence that could be regarded as lesser from a scientific point of view, leaving us to decide who has the right to be saved and whether any human is, in fact, disposable.

Overall, Stowaway is low-paced and undeniably claustrophobic, but at the heart of it, there is a genuinely intriguing philosophical idea that is not only engaging, but also fantastically thought out.

Stowaway is available now on Netflix.

Amazon Prime Video from 5 February

Prolific stunt actor-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh (Felon, Snitch) reunites with his Angel Has Fallen star Gerard Butler in Greenland, an unequivocally bleak and hugely watchable disaster movie with a sci-fi edge.

The film was originally set to be released in cinemas in July 2020, but became another victim of covid-19 closures. Greenland was eventually released online in the US in December and in the UK from 5 February, so anyone hoping to catch its full destructive power on the big screen will have to settle for home viewing.

Written by Chris Sparling (Buried) and co-produced by Butler, Greenland follows a family which must fight for survival while a planet-levelling comet races towards Earth. Structural engineer John Garrity (Butler) lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his estranged wife Allison (Homeland and Firefly star Morena Baccarin) and their son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd, Dr Sleep’s young Danny Torrance).

Comet catastrophe

Having moved out after an undisclosed indiscretion, John has returned to the family home to patch things up with his wife. Meanwhile, the whole neighbourhood have gathered around John and Allison’s TV to watch the near-Earth passing of a recently discovered interstellar comet, named Clarke.

Shortly before the comet is supposedly due to miss Earth by a whisker, John receives an automated call with instructions that he and his family have been selected for imminent evacuation. When the first fragment of the comet unexpectedly hits Tampa in Florida, the couple and their young diabetic son scramble to reach a nearby air force base where they are due to board a flight to safety with two days to go before the big impact.

Since this is a Gerard Butler movie, things don’t go to plan: confusion ensues as the family is separated, and they must do their best to find each other again to stand a chance of boarding a flight to safety. You can guess where the planes are headed!

Butler may have been over the top in the recent disaster movie Geostorm, but thankfully there is more to his performance this time – and to Greenland. Beyond the poor science (we are expected to believe that no one had envisaged that the comet might even come close to hitting Earth until it does, and that its trajectory wouldn’t have been calculated repeatedly), this is a genuinely spectacular production with impressive CGI of the comet and the initial impact and ­­­destruction.

Set against Geostorm’s lavish $120 million cost, Greenland’s $35 million price tag seems impressively modest. The film manages something truly unique by showing that you don’t need astronomical budgets to make a decent disaster movie.

Butler does what comes to him naturally and is hugely likeable as John, the gruff and not always squeaky clean hero. Baccarin gives a sedate and wonderfully understated performance as Allison, while Roger Dale Floyd shows once again that he has a great career ahead of him.

With plenty of soul-searching, Greenland is reminiscent of Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998) which is largely considered to be far superior to the brash and risibly over the top Armageddon. Both those earlier films were released in the same year with an almost identical premise, though Deep Impact featured nearly respectable science in places.

Greenland sits comfortably between the two, being nowhere as silly and preposterously sentimental as Armageddon and undeniably more pessimistic about the future than Deep Impact. The film’s plot can get a bit silly at times with Butler wading his way through improbable obstacles, but get past those drawbacks and it remains a genuinely impressive and thrilling film – far bleaker and more downbeat than you would expect from a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster.

In Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, Andrea Riseborough stars as Tasya Vos, a corporate assassin who weaponises the mind and body of an unsuspecting mark to gain access to someone close to them. PartĚýmind-twisting cerebral sci-fi, part stomach-churning body horror, the film is reminiscent of work by the director’s father, the master of body horror himself, David Cronenberg.

Recently separated single mother Vos is hired by a contract killing organisation headed by the enigmatic Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Her latest mission is to find and liquidate unscrupulous media tycoon John Parse (a snarling Sean Bean in fine form) with the help of his unsuspecting future son-in-law Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), who works as a lowly technician at Parse’s technology firm.

Using brain-implant technology, Vos takes control of Tate’s mind and body and finds herself living his life. She plans to assassinate Parse and pass it off as a revenge killing caused by a drunken argument between Tate and his fiancée Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton) at her father’s house. But as Vos sinks deeper into her assignment, she finds herself trapped in Tate’s body, unable to separate herself from him or cleanly finish her mission.

In his debut feature-length film, Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg explored celebrity culture in a world in which obsessive fans deliberately infected themselves with the diseases of their idols in order to feel closer to them. In Possessor, he turns to examine the physical and societal threats of modern technology in a near-future dominated by both analogue and digital technology. It is a world in which big corporations manipulate each other by infiltrating the bodies and minds of those at the top of the food chain, in order to destroy them from the inside.

Murders are depicted in gruesome and horrific detail, and leave very little to the imagination. Brandon Cronenberg demonstrates that no matter how far humans stray from their physical limitations, the mind can always be relied upon to remind them of who they really are and where they came from.

Riseborough is mesmerising as Vos, giving a career best performance. She cuts a ghostly figure as her character attempts to piece herself together after each soul-destroying mission. For his part, Abbott delivers an outstanding and courageous effort in an admittedly demanding role. He plays Tate with the kind of vulnerability and likability we have come to expect from him ever since his appearance in HBO’s popular TV series Girls.

Overall, Possessor feels both fresh and tense and full of surprising twists and turns. It successfully explores our experiences with modern anxieties and how we deal with them. Granted, this might not be for the faint-hearted, but if you are able to stomach its gorier elements, the reward is far greater than enduring yet another allegory- laden lazy narrative.

This is truly one of the best and smartest films of the past decade. In a year when most sci-fi fans had pinned their hopes on Christopher Nolan’s Tenet to deliver some much-needed escapism, Possessor surpasses those expectations by some distance.

Possessor is out in the US and Canada, and scheduled for release in the UK on 27 November.