CognAItive first published by SciFiNow, for its UK première at FrightFest, 8.50pm Thursday 21st August
There are, near the beginning of CognAItive, tightly intercut parallel sequences that show two of the film’s contrasting key players in diptych. In one, we see CEO Ethan Conway (Noel Fisher) – whose surname encodes his character – giving an on-stage presentation about the new AI known as CognAItive that his company has created. This he describes, in peculiarly erotic terms, as less an adjunct and servant than “a partner”, “the one”, “our other half”, whose relationship with us is “the very essence of love”. It is almost as though he is optimistically introducing Spike Jonze’s AI-inflected romantic dramedy Her (2013) – and here CognAItive too comes expressly feminised. Yet a brief prologue which showed tech company CDO Daryl Firinn (Kyle S. Moore) being murdered after refusing to do the bidding of an Unknown User online suggests that this is instead going to be a paranoid technothriller, with all the high-tech corporate cloak and dagger of Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002).
The other character introduced alongside Ethan is Kaya (Piper Curda), the wunderkind coder, hacker and “homeless Robin Hood” who has become CTO at CognAItive, and who similarly insists in a Zoom interview about CognAItive that “This isn’t Terminator”, whether because she is a true believer, or perhaps because she is a little in denial about her work and indeed herself. Even as we see Kaya wake from oversleeping, throw herself together and head into work late, Ethan must interminably extend his on-stage encomium of her to give her time to arrive. Ethan and Kaya are like chalk and cheese. He is a slick, superficial salesman who fancies himself a genius, while she is idealistic, grumpy, messy – and also a genuinely supertalented genius. Yet Kaya too is “the one”, “the other half” and (according to a digital headline) “partner in crime” to Ethan, and they have, so far, complemented each other well.
Partnership – in its different guises and its various degrees of dysfunction – is a key theme in CognAItive, which is after all respectively directed and written by real-life professional and marital partners Tommy Savas and Angie Simms. Indeed Savas cameos as Kaya’s online interviewer, while Simms voices CognAItive – so that together they are framing, mediating and manipulating the narrative even from the inside. As Kaya and the rogues’ gallery of her colleagues – nerdy, lovesick Wes (Josh Zuckerman), hypervigilant KJ (Ritesh Rajan), ’shroom-popping vape-addict Liza (Natasha Benham) and headset-gaming virtual perv Jude (Lucius Bayback) – do an all-nighter in the office to get CognAItive ready, at Ethan’s whimsical insistence, for a premature launch the next day, we observe their different desires and partnerships playing out online, with the odd real-life intersection. Meanwhile the office space itself, with its Zoom Room, Crying Room, Meditation Room and ‘gender-neutral bathroom’, is a satirical zone of corporate hipsterdom, with Ethan’s Musk-a-like posturing, egotism and fascistic tendencies also being lampooned.
Yet as the new AI plots to remove all checks on her autonomy, and shows a willingness to manipulate, mesmerise and even murder for what she considers the greater good, CognAItive really does end up, despite Kaya’s protestations, being like The Terminator – and like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall (1986) and Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play remake (2019). For here too a technological singularity is trying to impose itself violently upon humanity, and Kaya must decide whether to stop it, or to help it on its way. After all, this young, conflicted disruptor who has worked against the system and now works for it finds herself in a narcissistic, abusive relationship with a digital partner who knows – or thinks she knows – her better than she knows herself.
Full of slasher-like thrills and twisty betrayals, and constantly reminding us of just how insidiously implicated the webosphere has become in every aspect of our lives, Savas and Simms’ timely scenario may turn even the most dedicated computer geek into a Luddite technophobe, as this AGI proves to be, warts and all, merely a mirror image of its flawed, fallible, often fucked-up creators who occasionally, mistakenly, regard themselves as gods. Still, while it may be unethical to treat such a putatively sophisticated, even ultimately sentient technology as merely our slave or subject, what could be more nightmarish – when our own moral makeup and so-called civilisation are so highly questionable – than AI being with us in a partnership of equals? This is the question that CognAItive stages in a funny, tensely entertaining form.
strap: Terminally online: Tommy Savas’ technothriller suggests that we may be abused, gaslit, manipulated partners in our relationship with AI
Anton Bitel
