From Omeleto.
A woman goes on a technology fast.
DETOX is used with permission from Alex Hanno. Learn more at https://alexhanno.com.
Shelly is a social media addict on a "technology detox" in the northernmost reaches of Maine. She arrives at the house but immediately begins posting and checking her social media accounts. The next morning, she hides her phone and decides to experience nature instead.
She meditates and seems to experience some sense of peace, but finds that without her phone, her experience of real life is sometimes unsettling, especially as she hears strange sirens in the distance and notices more traffic driving past the house where she’s staying. Unable to stave off her curiosity, she finds her device and discovers what she’s missed out on during her brief interlude away.
Directed by Alex Hanno from a script co-written by Wes Hopper, this tension-filled, creeping short horror film delivers plenty of suspense and intrigue. Still, it’s also a stinging and ironically funny social satire on our dependence on mobile devices, changing how we live and experience reality.
The film immediately announces its eerieness from the start, with the barren, remote visual atmosphere provided by the muted light and colors of northern Maine and a discordant, chilling musical score that sets up expectations that something is off in this world. A voiceover of a self-help guru explaining the ins and outs of the technology fast helps structure the narrative, which focuses on Shelly’s somewhat ineffectual efforts to tear herself away from social media.
There’s a knowing humor in Shelly’s poor efforts, particularly in the gap between the earnestness of the voiceover’s entreaties and the weakness of Shelly’s ability to carry them out. But the well-paced storytelling’s main focus is slowly building suspense, leaving clues that something amiss is happening in the world. Actor Caitlin Morris’s performance adroitly balances the film’s ironic, satirical sense of humor with a more emotionally grounded layer, especially as Shelly realizes something is going on — something important that she ironically missed at first because of her digital detox.
When Shelly discovers what it is, DETOX amps up the thriller/horror aspect of its storytelling, bringing the film to a fast-paced, exciting conclusion. But even in the thrills and chills, it retains its subversive, cheeky humor to its end. Even at the darkest point, the compulsion to pick up the phone, take a picture and post it online remains. If it wasn’t posted, did we really experience it? Are our digital footprints the only legacy we leave at the end? And if the apocalypse is happening, can we tear ourselves away long enough to focus on saving ourselves? The film has an answer to these questions, one as memorably darkly ironic and biting as its final images.
