A man comes home and finds himself dead and a USB stick with a video of himself explaining why he is dead. We then follow the dead version of the guy in the past. It all started when he, a cryptographer, was hired by the NSA to decrypt a encrypted message. The message is from a future satellite, as in a satellite from the future that is now in the present which is the past from the point of view of the original guy from the second word in this paragraph.
After decrypting the code and being thrown out like a bag of soggy chips, his life unravels. We knew that already because he ends up dead in front of himself.
The most interesting scenes in the film are the one featuring the men in black. Unlike the wacky version Tommy Lee Jones brought us in the 90s, the real men in black are creepy thin pale dudes with no hair and red lips. I say real but what I mean is “conspiracy theory canon.” They are all about that uncanny valley high strangeness aura.
A good chink of the film are less interesting. A Beautiful Mind-esque scenes of a dude loosing his mind and writing stuff on different platforms. This ain’t A Beautiful Mind, though. The film has a bit of an amateurish vibe. Kyle Gallner and Azura Skye do a good job, but when a maestro like Richard Schiff appears oppose them… well, you know.
The whole thing is fine, but it’s a bit like a made for TV X-Files clone from the 00s featuring a malicious version of the beings from Interstellar. It’s a big ol’ meh.
