Screenlife motion pictures and producer Timur Bekmambetov go collectively like wine and cheese. An off-shoot of discovered footage, movies on this class happen totally on pc and/or telephone screens, a proper premise that, in its temporary historical past — for the reason that 2002 experiment “The Collingswood Story” — has developed in exceptional methods. Bekmambetov has produced horror (“Unfriended”), dramatic thrillers (“Looking out”) and even Shakespeare (“R#J”) on this mode, and with the Ronan Corrigan-directed “LifeHack,” the style now strikes dauntlessly into heist film territory. Your mileage might range, however for followers of the format, it’s an absolute deal with.

Historically, heist movies contain slick, seasoned professionals transferring via area, in direction of one outlined goal, just like the vault in “Ocean’s 11.” Nevertheless, the age of cryptocurrency and digital wallets permits the debuting Corrigan to flip these expectations on their head, by way of a story of 4 lonely youngsters with one thing to show. There’s a exceptional quantity of visible element concerned in “LifeHack,” to the purpose {that a} Screenlife premise looks like the one method this story might’ve been conceived. It’s a movie that includes sensible hacking (a minimum of, extra sensible than Hollywood is accustomed to), one wherein info, jokes and memes flood the display as shortly as they do the lives of Technology Z — solely its photographs are rigorously curated by human arms, fairly than algorithmically. The result’s a genuinely humorous and finally heart-pounding manufacturing, with an executions that seems like a heist itself.

The movie pushes the boundaries of the screens-only idea, given how a lot of its motion unfolds distant from computer systems. It options safety digital camera footage and FaceTime calls galore, and but, it tethers itself to the POV of a single character — English slacker and shut-in Kyle (Georgie Farmer) — by presenting all these home windows to the world on his pc, with solely occasional cutaways to his smartphone. By means of a brisk, economical montage that includes youthful variations of every character (at this level, what younger actor doesn’t have their very own decade-old YouTube web page to tug from?), the film shortly establishes its central relationships, between Kyle and his enterprising childhood buddy in America, Petey (James Vinh Scholz); his high-energy comrade, the man Englishman Sid (Roman Hayeck-Inexperienced); and his American crush Alex (Yasmin Finney), a bright-eyed woman with dour secrets and techniques.

The quartet largely gathers to play first-person shooter video games on-line, however as a bunch with numerous skillsets, in addition they partake in one of many web’s favourite new types of leisure: discovering web scammers (normally from India) posing as American authorities, and counter-scamming and even outright threatening them in return. This vigilante prank-reversal units the lay of the land, each by way of the buddy group’s hacking skills, in addition to the Wild West morality of the fashionable web, the place something goes so long as you may justify it in your personal head.

This leads them to their subsequent massive plan: pulling a crypto heist by gathering as a lot info as they will on tech billionaire and proper wing media character Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles), a thinly-veiled Elon Musk stand-in with extra of an edge and extra harmful secrets and techniques. Discovering the group’s M.O. is a pleasure unto itself, starting with an assault on Don via his social media influencer daughter Lindsey (Jessica Reynolds). The nearer the chums come to gathering sufficient info, the extra their confidence skyrockets alongside their rising paranoia and anxiousness, making “LifeHack” a nail-biting watch. Nevertheless, the movie additionally stays firmly rooted within the query of what’s motivating them to tackle this job. There’s sufficient conversational downtime between every part of their plan to determine the main points of their residence lives, which contain both overbearing or distant mother and father, subtly framing their harebrained crypto scheme as an act of rousing teenage riot.

Nevertheless, it isn’t lengthy earlier than the film’s sliding ethical scale introduces extra complicated questions (along with present authorized risks) of whether or not they need to be doing this in any respect. They usually attempt to justify their motives via an altruistic lens, however the temporary glimpses Corrigan and his performers provide us, into every character’s adrenaline rush when issues go their method, says in any other case. Earlier than you recognize it, all of the scamming and anti-scamming loops again on itself via stunning turns, backing the buddy group into quite a few corners and exacerbating the tensions between them.

Climaxing in an intense remaining act with each real-world and Screenlife dimensions (once more, as seen on Kyle’s pc), “LifeHack” finds deft steadiness between its heist components and its quiet moments of character. All of those show immensely entertaining. With a techno soundtrack that retains factor propulsive, the film by no means slows down, even when it takes a breather.