Discontinued
Alternately bleak and hopeful, Trevor Peckham’s Discontinued is a refreshingly original sci-fi take on addiction, maturity and the connective tissue of society that refuses to baby its audience even when it probably should.
Picking apart the why’s and needs for society to exist, Peckham’s necessarily small mindbender plays with big ideas cunningly concealed within the clichés of other genres. Disaffected twentysomething Sarah (Hutchinson) could be mistaken for an escape from another, lesser comedy about a burgeoning adult who pushes society away because they are terrified of joining it. A lot of them have been made. All of that is pushed out the window, so to speak, when a charismatic hologram (Fishburne) appears on televisions worldwide to let everyone know the world doesn’t actually exist, it’s merely a computer simulation which will soon end. Everyone in the world, from Sarah to her parents to her therapist (Picardo) have to decide if they will be removed from the simulation and inserted into a permanent heaven where they will experience the most blissful moments of their lives over and over, or if they will decide to remain behind in a largely empty world which will likely gradually fall apart.
There are a lot of directions a story can go from that direction, from questions of what do those types of questions mean to how people respond to such a change in all they know. Discontinued is not dark enough to delve into Solaris-like existentialism or comedic enough to highlight a discussed but unseen descent into debauchery as consequence is removed from life choices. Like the proverbial terrorist forcing a stark character choice via explosives, the decision here is so starkly keyed to Sarah’s own disassociation with the world around her it could have been specifically engineered for her. And maybe it was.
Alone among anyone she knows, Sarah earnestly questions whether deciding to remain behind in quiet isolation isn’t the superior choice. Like Will Freeman she believes every person really is an island and likes it that way. Or at least she thinks she does.
Buried deep, deep (maybe too deep) within this is the reality of Sarah’s past battles with alcoholism and the reality that if the world hadn’t ended she was headed towards relapse. She systematically ignores her therapist’s advice to stop worrying about what she can’t control. That is, to recognize her powerlessness in the face of addiction, let go of a need for control and trust in a higher power. In this case the higher power just happens to be an artificial intelligence enabling self-actualization for its subject but tomato, tomato.
If the consequences do remain small, they are still surprising. Refusing to be pinned down by the easy narrative structure Discontinued masquerades in at the start, Peckham continually twists the narrative into unexpected directions in order to wear down Sarah’s prickly exterior. Rather than fill the time with interactions among friends and family heading to the final goodbye, Discontinued suddenly jumps forward into the empty world Sarah was pondering and find it to be not at all bad. That only lasts long enough for the obvious flaw in her desire to make itself apparent before Peckham changes perspective again. Discontinued always keeps you on your toes.
The lack of scale works against some of the large ideas Peckham is playing with and puts a tremendous amount on Hutchinson’s shoulders but she carries it off even weighed down by some early indie film cliché that should have died already. It quickly burns itself down to its essence, however, revealing a thoughtful and bracing thought experiment about the need for human connection and the ways we try to convince ourself it’s not real.