Trevor Peckham’s Discontinued is a must see from the Cinejoy film festival. Its wry sense of humor and imaginative but humble plot navigate the pandemic and isolation through a tidy and strange metaphor. A thirty-something underachiever in a rut discovers that the world has basically just lost its patch updates and every one of its NPCs are given a choice to go to a storage facility where they relive their top three greatest memories in constant loop or to stay in the Raptured post-apocalypse that is the “discontinued” reality of her Earth. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a slightly more soapy, nervous version of something like Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, though in that book, the multiversal themes are about playing up racial disparities, whereas in Discontinued, it’s more about personal growth and an exploration of self-actualization. Sarah, played by Ashley Hutchinson, has incredible range. She can hit the high register of anxiety without going full Jesse Eisenberg, her dad’s appearance melts her, and her venom directed toward the walking embodiment of toxic masculinity (Michael Bonini doing a really delightful impression of the Just Bought a Boat guy from SNL) doesn’t add anything new to dating post-pandemic, but it does paint a picture of the hopelessness of our current situation.
Though Discontinued often flirts with Suicide as Plot, it redeems itself with the novelty of imagining the last days of civilization once we realize it’s all a shell game. To that end, some questions: why do electricity, planes, and cell phones work just fine when Sarah herself decides that it’s not worth showing up for work? Sarah asks that herself of the barista and it seems like there’s maybe a cheeky reference here to the limp distinction made early on in the pandemic between “essential” (expendable) and “non-essential” (valuable) workers. In part it seems to be a convenience of plot: the world would be a lot less comfortable to live in for its final days if everyone were looting and shooting each other up in anticipation for the End Times. But the dark side of Discontinued is always inward, never externalized. Even Bonini’s fin-bro in his most vile moments resorts only to describing sex as transactional and emotionally manipulating her for his own gratification, there’s no hint of physical violence of the Z for Zachariah sort, or even more apropos, Azador in Tad William’s Otherland, where there’s the distinct intimation that once the sentient being discovers that everyone else is a NPC, he runs rampant without compunction for their health, safety, or emotional trauma.
If there’s a twist or a turn in Discontinued, it’s the final act after the End of the World Party. It’s worth keeping you in the dark, since the rest of the structure of this movie is fairly simple, but the way that the story keeps tumbling from there is interesting but not quite satisfying narratively and fills me with even more questions about Suicide as Plot and what constitutes Heaven in this AI multiverse.
The unnamed AI gameshow host (played by Lawrence Fishburne’s son, Langston Fishburne) has a terrifically weird role as calm exposition delivery vehicle but also emotional comfort animal in the vein of Matt Damon’s role in The Martian, where the audience is his surrogate cheerleader on a survivalist adventure on the moon, or maybe Clooney’s role in Gravity. Robert Picardo plays Sarah’s analyst and he has a few comic moments with Sarah. Kayla (Michelle Yazvac) does a lot of drama kid hands and the shots between her and Sarah are too closely cropped and seldom show the two of them together in a single, unbroken scene, carrying on dialogue, which makes some of the early scenes feel a little less polished than the rest of the movie. Probably the most surprising moment emotionally is completely unrelated to the high fantasy concept of the Austenesque twist on Free Guy, it is Sarah’s visit to her parents house, where there are some straight faced physical humor and absurdist lines that will knock the wind out of you laughing so hard.
