Reviews
‘Appofeniacs’ Review – Deepfake Cautionary Tale Thrills as Much as It Horrifies [Fantastic Fest]
More so than ever before, we live in an age of misinformation. Thanks to deepfake technology and deceptive social media algorithms, it’s becoming more and more difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality as people are manipulated into believing things that are simply not true. It’s a wonder that deepfakes haven’t made their way into more genre films, but writer/director Chris Marrs Piliero‘s Appofeniacs is here to get the job done, serving as a cautionary tale for our current times that’s as thrilling as it is horrifying with its real-world implications.
Appofeniacs is an ensemble piece told through a series of interwoven vignettes, but the character at the center of it all is Duke (Aaron Holiday), a troubled, paranoid young man who goes on a frenzy of deepfake creations, using them to turn people against anyone who even slightly pisses him off. Other times, he just wants to be an agent of chaos and watch the world burn, which means that anyone and everyone is a target.
From the very first scene, Piliero establishes a sense of unpredictability as we witness, out of context, James (Chad Addison) murder his girlfriend Ali (Scarlet DeMeo) because he suspects infidelity. From there, we’re introduced to cosplayer Poppy (Simran Jehani), who takes an Uber with driver Tim (Will Brandt) to a secluded cabin where her friends Chase (Amogh Kapoor) and Stoletto (Massi Pregoni) are marveling over a new shield replica they purchased from famed cosplay costume designer Clinto Binto (Sean Gunn), known for making authentic replicas of anime weapons. On the periphery of all this is Cedrick (Jermaine Fowler, The Blackening), who is grappling with the ethics of deepfake technology, and Lazzy (Paige Searcy), who has an unfortunate confrontation with Duke over the necessity of tipping baristas (he’s a petty fucker, that one).
Best known for his music videos for pop stars like Britney Spears, Ariana Grande and Kesha, Piliero delivers a remarkably confident feature debut that never threatens to buckle under the pressure of all the plates it’s spinning. Appofeniacs is a delightful puzzle of a film, shifting gears several times as character connections are slowly revealed over the course of its 90-minute runtime (think Pulp Fiction for the digital age), with Piliero keeping viewers on their toes as he ratchets up the tension with each new revelation.
Simran Jehani as Poppy in Appofeniacs
The film’s structure means that most characters don’t have enough time to be fully fleshed out before they exit the film in one way or another, but Searcy makes the strongest impression, imbuing Lazzy with a down-to-earth relatability that endears. Holiday intentionally irks as the tweaky Duke, and Gunn is also having a blast in his smaller role as the eccentric Clinto Binto. The character actor fits right in with some of the films more heightened elements.
Thematically, Appofeniacs doesn’t have much to say other than “deepfakes bad” and “people dumb.” It isn’t necessarily aiming to be a profound commentary, satisfied with acting as a cautionary “what if” tale whose stakes keep escalating with each passing scene. Real-world politics are non-existent here, with Piliero focusing on more general concepts to get his point across. Even if Appofeniacs’ commentary isn’t as deep as one would like, Piliero’s script is at least able to capture the real-life anxieties surrounding race relations, toxic masculinity and fragile male egos to great effect.
Piliero builds suspense not with chase sequences or kill scenes (though there are plenty of those), but simply with our daily interactions with strangers. Director of photography Adam Leene relies mostly on the slow zoom to create a sense of unease, especially in one of the more gripping sequences that sees Lazzy hesitate a Black man’s presence in the parking lot of her workplace after a deepfake video of her spouting racial slurs is posted on Reddit. Appofeniacs flips the script on the question of how well you really know the person standing next to you. Rather, what do they think they know about you? Piliero gets a lot of mileage out of sequences like this, turning Appofeniacs into a simmering kettle of distrust that eventually boils over in an orgy of blood so satisfying that it needs to be seen with a crowd.
Appofeniacs is a pleasant surprise and a strong debut for Piliero, even if it does fall into the occasional style-over-substance trapping. It nails the thrills, though, and weaves the narrative threads together with enough confidence to make Piliero a creator to look out for.
Appofeniacs made its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest. No release date has been set.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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