Director/Screenplay/Photography – Trevor Peckham, Story – Trevor Peckham & Michael Villucci, Producers – Ashley Hutchinson, Trevor Peckham & Michael Villucci, Music – Olaf Thorvaldsson, Special Effects – Cole Greenbaun, Production Design – Violet Morrison. Production Company – Discontinued Film, LLC.
Cast
Ashley Hutchinson (Sarah), Langston Fishburne (The Guide), Robert Picardo (Theodore), Michael Bonini (Tucker), Charlie Talbert (Gary), Michelle Yazac (Kayla), Risa Benson (Sharon), Bill Sorice (Barry)
Plot
Sarah feels unhappy with her life – recently laid off from her job, while having no luck as a solar panels salesperson, nor on the dating scene. She is startled by the abrupt announcement via tv that it has been decided that the virtual simulation that is reality is being shut down. A man then appears in her apartment and introduces himself as her guide through the process. He assures her that everybody will be rehoused, although people can have the choice to stay on if they wish. While everybody else makes the decision to go, Sarah decides to stay on. In the deserted world, she discovers that she finally has the freedom to be herself.
Simulation Theory is the idea that the world that we live in is a virtual simulation. The concept was popularised by The Matrix (1999) but in 2003 Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom asked how we would deal with life if we were living in a simulation and how such could be proven. The idea took off and has started to filter through into a whole host of internet conspiracy boards and reddit threads. More recently, it has started to appear in a number of films, including The Mandela Effect (2019) and Bliss (2021), while Rodney Ascher even made a documentary about it with A Glitch in The Matrix (2021).
Discontinued never does much to address the wheres and whys of its simulated world. Langston Fishburne (the son of Laurence) does at one point have a speech about how various worlds are created to test what happens when different factors are changed and that this world was one was created to test the reactions to an extinct penguin. Exactly who is behind this we are not told, although we do get a brief clip playing on tv in the background at one point talking about Ancient Astronauts, which leaves you with the implication the controllers might be aliens.
Ashley Hutchinson faces the end of the reality simulation alone
Discontinued is not so much interested in being an SF film as it is a work about one woman (lead actress and co-producer Ashley Hutchinson)’s self-realisation. The early sections chart her dissatisfaction with work, the bad date (Michael Bonini) that she is set up on by her friend and her voicing unhappiness with life to her psychologist (Robert Picardo). The end of the world (or simulated world) becomes the opportunity for self-realisation and the discovery that she is happiest being herself and away from others’ expectations of her. Robert Picardo gets an amusing scene where he mouths off at how terrible millennials are and, given that the end of the world is reduced to one person’s opportunity for self-realisation, you cannot help but have sneaking sympathy for him.
This is a quiet The End of the World, not an apocalyptic one a la Last Night (1998) and These Final Hours (2013), or the work this most resembles How It Ends (2021). People disappear to wherever they go and Ashley Hutchinson is left in a mostly deserted world. Unlike almost any other film on the subject, there is no chaos, anarchy and grim fight for survival – we see Ashley biking around to pick up canned supplies and refill her water containers and that is it. Some of the less upbeat questions of how she would get by without power or medical supplies are left unanswered.
Discontinued was a directorial debut for Trevor Peckham, who had previously worked as a cinematographer.
