Director – Natalie Kennedy, Screenplay – Stephen Berman, Producer – Rebecca-Clare Evans, Photography – James Oldham, Music – Arhynn Descy, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tom Saville, Makeup Effects Design – KM Effects, Art Direction – Rhiannon Clifford. Production Company – Kenmor Films.
Rachel Shelley (Claire Rivers), Heida Reed (Rita), Wayne Brady (Henry), Annie Cusselle (Young Claire), Rebecca-Clare Evans (Helen Rivers)
Writer Claire Rivers is nearing the deadline for her new book but is suffering from writer’s block. She decides the only option is to go away to The Retreat, a fully-automated A.I.-run luxury facility that tends her every need while she works. She signs in for thirty days where she is attended by the android maid Rita and the friendly house A.I. that appears in the form of the hologram Henry. Despite this, Claire continues to struggle with her writer’s block. The Retreat’s computer systems are then invaded by malware and begin to malfunction. Rita now insists that Claire is not allowed out until she completes her book. Unable to escape and with only the malfunctioning Rita for company, Claire is forced to complete the book to obtain her freedom.
There has been a major upsurge of films about Androids and Artificial Intelligence since the early 2010s. These include works like Her (2013), The Machine (2013), Automata (2014), Chappie (2015), Ex Machina (2015), Morgan (2016), tv’s Westworld (2016-22), Zoe (2018), Archive (2020), After Yang (2021), Finch (2021), The Artifice Girl (2022), M3gan (2022) and The Creator (2023), and others.
Among these there have been a peculiar subset of films about A.I.’s making women prisoners. There was Tau (2018) in which a creepy billionaire makes Maika Monroe prisoner in his automated house and she must bargain with the A.I. in order to get free. Two months after Blank came out, we also had Dark Cloud (2022), which had a near-identical premise where a woman is trapped in an A.I.-run house designed to help her recuperate. These were followed by a further film I’ll Be Watching (2023) also about a woman trapped in a smarthome and T.I.M. (2023) where an android develops stalkery behaviours. The theme goes all the way back to earlier works like Demon Seed (1977) where a computer decides to imprison Julie Christie in her home to impregnate her and The Companion (1994) where Kathryn Harrold is imprisoned by her love robot after she tinkers with its safety protocols. Most of these end up being Imprisonment Thrillers.
I spent most of the time watching Blank nitpicking the technical improbability of the set-up of The Retreat. You keep wondering how incompetent the company’s tech support must be to have such poorly maintained firewalls that malware can get in and wreak such havoc as to even delete account details. While this is not impossible, most tech support would have backups and conduct a system reboot and restore within a matter of hours, a day or so at most. Especially considering … there are human beings trapped inside the system. Does nobody actually think to conduct a manual check to see what has happened to the guests? Or have they just been forgotten? Is there no manual system for a guest talking to a human tech support operator such as a landline? How can anybody not think that this would open up the company to massive lawsuits when word of this got out?
Director Natalie Kennedy never does much to make Blank work as an Imprisonment Thriller. With these sorts of films, you are used to the director riding a rollercoaster of build-up of the possibilities of escape and then dashing of tensions, but we never get that here. Rachel Shelley’s sole attempts to escape involve her throwing a chair at an unbreakable window and remotely turning on her car alarm in the hope someone will come by and hear it. Not to mention there are just times the film stretches plausibility – like when Rachel Shelley goes away and just types an entire novel from scratch in a matter of hours to fool Heida Reed into letting her go, or how her finished manuscript comes off the typewriter as a completely finished article without apparently requiring any rewrites or edits.
The one thing that does work rather well is Heida Reed, a former Icelandic model, who is cast as the android maid. Perfectly made up and outfitted, Reed’s performance is all blank incomprehension and perfectly mannered civility. Nothing suggests the system going amok better than her little quirks like resetting daily, pouring coffee in a cup to the point of overspilling, or breaking dishes and picking up pieces of broken glass from the floor one shard at a time because she seems unable to work out how to use a broom and pan.
Trailer here