Otherlife

 TLDR: God, I fucking hated this movie.

 Otherlife is a 2017 indie Australian sci fi movie. Let me list the positives first, because it does do some things right and it's important to recognize them before I open the floodgates and let the bile flow.

 On a surface level, it looks and sounds great - director Ben C. Lucas does wonders with his budget, and the resulting film is slick as all hell. The premise is handled in a way that cleverly limits the need for special effects, the music is kind of cool, the cinematography (by Dan Freene) is propulsive and polished. More importantly, the acting is pretty good on average, and the film is more than ably anchored by Jessica De Gouw, who brings a good amount of prickly intensity to her character.

 It's also got a very powerful nightmare scenario at its core; It would make for a great short if you removed all the crap around it.

 Its premise is the limpest of soft sci-fi: a Black Mirror-inspired setup where Ren, a young scientist (De Gouw) both develops eye drops that cause the user to live through a whole experience as if it were real, and codes the dreams that the drops deliver. Sort of like Strange Days, but the experience isn't recorded, it's programmed whole-cloth, like a virtual reality scenario.

 Ren founds a company to market her (well, it's not really hers - it's complicated) invention along with a douchebag executive type (T.J. Power). The product they intend to launch is the expected 'holiday' vignettes (skydiving, snowboarding, that sort of thing), but T.J. is already wheeling and dealing with dodgy elements of the Australian government for some... less than wholesome applications of the technology in the penal sector. And on a slightly less unethical violation of their partnership, Ren is in turn using the technology on the sly to try and bring her brother out of a coma.

 An unfortunate mishap gets Ren in hot water with the law, and she's offered a deal to get out of it that's so fucking stupid it nearly broke me. I mean... it's not the even the situation itself, which is plenty stupid, but the way it's all set up - the script (by the director and Gregory Widen) just doesn't seem to understand or give a shit about plausibility, the way organizations work or even basic human behaviour. It's a scene so moronic it immediately annihilated what little suspension of disbelief I had left at that point.
 And if there's anything this movie needs, it's goodwill. It's rare that I get angry at films these days, but this one had me seething for a full hour or so.

 That sorry twist leads to the film's best scene, a nasty Twilight Zone-esque (or Black Mirror) low blow that's genuinely evil fun. But that's the last good idea the film has, and it's over and done pretty quickly. From there it devolves into an extremely shitty conspiracy with a very obvious twist, and it ends with a way to get its villain to get a... let's call it crowd pleasing comeuppance that's almost admirable in its willingness to get even dumber than all the idiocy that comes before it.

 The story is fucking rank. A collection of plot holes, clichés, hand-woven elements and terrible character work that's all the worse for its self-seriousness. Bullshit, all bullshit. Something like Moonfall is probably dumber, but at least it knows it's dumb.

 As for the science fiction elements... ah, hell.

 Other than some very basic talk of 'nanites' (which is code for 'we couldn't be arsed to think of a proper scientifically plausible explanation') and 'memories are chemistry anyways', the film doesn't even try to make sense of the magic technology at its center, which... fair enough, we're just meant to accept it as a premise. I'll even let it pass uncommented (well, besides this comment) that injecting a memory wouldn't involve the sense of living it in the present, as the film shows, complete with decision making, because I could fill in the blanks for that (the decisions were illusory, etc.) But the fact that the film doesn't even begin addressing any of this... well, it shows a complete and characteristic disregard for the science part of its chosen genre.

 Science fiction has a long used dodgy or impossible science to then use at least a measure of intellectual rigour in the exploration of how those flawed concepts would impact both societies and individuals.

 No such luck here; Not even an appreciable attempt. It keeps setting up rules it quickly breaks - one moment it's hard to go for more than a day in a simulation, then they just go and put someone in for a whole bloody year, just like that. It puts emphasis on regulations and societal controls over new technology to then reveal Ren's been mainlining her eye drops like a dope fiend, and an important plot point (the one that broke me) has the government basically says yes, let's just use it in this highly risky, untested way, can't see a problem with that.

 It is basically one insult to your intelligence after another, delivered with a sort of potboiler intensity that I might excuse as pulpy weren't it so relentlessly stupid. It kind of pains me to say this about something into which so much effort was obviously sunk in, but for fuck's sake stay away from this brain-dead pile of shit.