Appofeniacs first published by SciFiNow, for its world première at FrightFest 2025, Friday 22 August
After on-screen text is shown defining the word apophenia (“The tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things”), an opening sequence pins down the punning link between this technical term and the title of Chris Marrs Piliero’s feature debut, Appofeniacs, while also wrongfooting us with misdirection to illustrate how easily our impressions and prejudices can be manipulated. We first see – and hear – James (Chad Addison) watching a porn video on a phone app in the privacy of his own home. James, however, is not, as we might first imagine, masturbating, but rather weeping, as he recognises that the copulating couple in the video is his girlfriend Ali (Scarlett DeMeo) and friend Chase (Amogh Kapoor). When Ali arrives home, James attacks her, and despite her panicked protestations, shoots her dead.
In fact both James and Ali have been victims of a deepfake video produced on a new app which Duke (Aaron Holliday) is showing off to his dodgy creditor Cedrick (Jermaine Fowler), who is very keen to see a return on his investment. “People are easy to manipulate,” Duke says, “and let me tell you, Ced, manipulating them has never been easier, and it’s never been more fun.” Duke is a basic incel nerd – impulsive, quick to anger, inclined towards stupid and self-destructive behaviours, pettily vindictive, near sociopathic when it comes to the lives of strangers and irresponsibly oblivious to consequences – which is to say he is the living, breathing embodiment of instantly recognisable modes of conduct online. Indeed the different narratives of Appofeniacs – with their cucking scenarios, their cosplay appurtenances, their ranting microaggressions against the minutiae of everyday living and even, if you wait till the coda, their dogs on skateboards – bring the memes and manners of the internet to life.
Here a group of complete strangers – not just James, Ali and Chase but their friends Poppy (Simran Jehani), Stoletto (Massi Pregoni) and Banks (Michael Abbot Jr) – whose collective online presence has met with Duke’s arbitrary disapproval, or the artist Clinto Binto (Sean Gunn) who is charging Duke more for an item than he can currently afford, or Lazzy (Paige Searcy), who randomly annoys Duke in a café queue (with writer/director Piliero cameoing as a barista), will all find themselves in a hell of malicious misinformation with real-life ramifications and a lot of collateral damage, as Duke messes with them remotely like a small-minded god and lights a cherry bomb under their sense of reality. Yet while Duke’s online interventions may be the common link to these three episodes, there are also wild cards here – like up-for-anything Uber driver Texas Tim (Will Brandt), Clinto Binto’s wife Evie (Harley Bronwyn) and Cedrick himself – who forge more unpredictable bridges between these different story strands, only adding to the chaotic effect.
There is a narrative principle of economy, often ascribed to the Russian playwright Chekhov, stating that a gun seen in a story must go off before the end. Yet while there are certainly guns in Appofeniacs, the same principle also applies here to a tube of super-adhesive glue (“you get that on your skin, you are going to regret it”) and a panoply of “original Clinto Binto replicas” which “cut, shoot, spin” – all of which will, merely by appearing, raise certain expectations which are more then satisfactorily realised in the end. For here, even cosplay fantasy is folded into reality, and fake weapons prove genuinely deadly, as everybody gets to play out their dreams – and nightmares. Meanwhile if the messing with chronological order, the criss-crossing of stories, and the incorporation into the dialogue of many pop-culture and film references, all point to the strong influence of Quentin Tarantino, Piliero amply repays the debt by giving prominence to both discussion – and a DVD copy – of Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012).
All this makes for an unstable – which is to say, endlessly surprising – film, where one thing leads to another via paths that are by no means straight, and the glue that holds everything together is a rich amalgam of both chance and causality. At its heart, this is tapping into a very new kind of anxiety. “In the wrong hands, this technology could get kind of ruthless,” Cedrick says of the deepfaking app, to which Duke replies, “It’s already in the wrong hands because it’s in our hands,” adding, “Reality’s about to get really confusing.” Sure enough, Appofeniacs graphically demonstrates how readily lives can spiral out of control when someone has interfered with and altered their online image – and once that disjuncture between our real and virtual selves has broken down, paranoia, pandemonium and bloody, splattery violence tend to ensue.
Energetic, funny and weird, Appofeniacs is a cautionary tale of where our new age of digital fakery might be headed. With its ensemble cast and episodic structure, this recalls Ryan Prows’ Lowlife (2017), and is every bit as confident, genre-savvy and utterly, amazingly fucked up. Perhaps most miraculous of all, though, despite being about apps and online influence, it finds ways to keep its action grounded almost entirely in the real world, so that for the most part, the only screen is the one on which we are watching the film, where audiovisual fiction of a different order is unravelling.
strap: Chris Marrs Piliero’s deepfake debut feature is a rambunctious ensemble clusterfuck messing online with its characters’ identity and reality
Anton Bitel
