Director – Spencer Brown, Screenplay – Spencer Brown & Sarah Govett, Producers – Patrick Tolan & Matthew James Wilkinson, Photography – Dave Miller, Music – Walter Mair, Visual Effects Supervisor – Joseph Batten, Special Effects Supervisor – Steve Bowman, Makeup & Figurative Effects – 13 Fingers FX (Designer – Dan Martin), Production Design – Elizabeth El-Kadhi. Production Company – Stigma Films/Art Through Film/Trigger Films/Shout Loud Creative/Gorilla VFX/Capture/Brainstorm Media/Altitude Film Entertainment.
Cast
Georgina Campbell (Abi Grainger), Eamon Farren (T.I.M.), Mark Rowley (Paul Grainger), Amara Karan (Rose Da Silva), Nathaniel Parker (Dewson)
Plot
Abi Grainger and her husband Paul buy a house in the countryside so that she can take a new job with Integrate Robotics. One of the requirements of the job is that she have T.I.M. (Technologically Integrated Manservant), one of the company’s androids, to help around the house. T.I.M. requires access to their smart systems and phone and email passwords. T.I.M. proves highly efficient. Paul then begins to believe that T.I.M. is acting obsessively about Abi but she dismisses the idea. Paul comes to realise that T.I.M. is lying and fabricating evidence to drive a wedge between the two of them.
T.I.M. does nothing except churn clichés of the A.I. genre about androids going amok. There is not a huge amount of difference between T.I.M. and other films like Demon Seed (1977), Electric Dreams (1984) or The Companion (1994) where the A.I./android develops lustful/romantic feelings. Indeed, the film has zero interest in depicting T.I.M. discovering artificial intelligence – in no time at all, T.I.M. develops lust for Georgina Campbell and is acting all jealous. Indeed, T.I.M. could well be the first robot stalker film. For no particular reason, T.I.M. starts becoming obsessive towards Georgina, deciding her husband (Mark Rowley) must be eliminated from the scene and then conducting complex gaslighting schemes, including Deep Faking security camera footage and creating false credit card purchases, to make Georgina think her husband is having an affair with neighbour Amara Karan.
I had major difficulties with the believability of the android. T.I.M. makes far too much in the way of subjective judgements – “I enjoyed that” referring to a movie, telling Georgina Campbell “your beauty is exquisite” and “you look beautiful” – or else is quickly making emotive announcements such as “I think I would like to be loved,” none of which should be in its programming. Despite surely not being programmed with anything akin to sexual desire, we see T.I.M. sniffing Georgina Campbell’s panties (admittedly this could well be part of a ruse to fool husband Mark Rowley), sneaking surreptitious looks at her in a mirror as she dresses and insisting that she wear a particular dress that it thinks she looks beautiful in – which are all behaviours that would belong to a controlling boyfriend as opposed to an android. Not to mention the elaborate gaslight schemes that T.I.M. conducts would be ones that would seem to require a sophisticated knowledge of human behaviour and reactions, which seems highly advanced for a machine just coming to understand the world for the first time.
(l to r) Georgina Campbell activates T.I.M. (Eamon Farren) as husband Mark Rowley looks on
In a lot of ways T.I.M. isn’t even really a film about an android stalker, it is a film about anxiety with technological changes. T.I.M. represents an embodiment of all the concerns about what we are doing when we use our smart homes, our interconnected devices, driverless cars, e-wallets, fears of Deep Fake technology and predictive behavioural profiling that can be gleaned from looking at a person’s web footprint, and proceeds to show all of this maliciously turned against us.
The other aspect of the film that failed to work for me was the casting of Georgina Campbell. She’s an okay lead but failed to make much distinction on me. The big credibility issue I had is that she seems perfect casting in the role of the wife but failed to make me believe that she was the robotics expert, who as a rule seem very nerdy and engrossed in the technical side of things. Campbell comes with a bland, tepid range of emotions – it is hard even to invest in convincingly believing we are seeing her terrorised by an amok android during the latter parts of the show.
T.I.M. was a directorial debut for Spencer Brown, who has prior credits as an actor.
