Disconnect (斷了線)

My 17th HKIFF film catapulted me from early 1800s Portugal back to contemporary America. I wonder if the film Disconnect by Henry Alex Rubin might not have been secretly funded by various producers of anti-virus software. It's a story about about how fraud might be committed through that universal and omnipresent, omnipotent media of communication called the internet and how easily what we say on the internet, including our most intimate personal details may be traced and monitored by others and in the wrong hands be  exploited. The story traces three of them, emotional fraud, commercial fraud and sex fraud.

The internet really connects people in the virtual world and by the same token it can disconnect people in the real world. In this thriller, we are introduced to the lives of three families.  Derek (Alexander Skarsgård), a former marine and now a business executive suddenly discovers that his credit card was rejected whilst working at Sao Paulo. He suspects that his wife Cindy (Paula Patton) has been overspending. She did not. He reports the matter to the police who didn't help much. So he hired Mike (Frank Grillo), a private detective who had been working at the police cyber crime squad for 20 years whose report made a surprise finding: Derek's wife had been communicating with another person Steven Schumacher (Michael Nyqvist) whom she thought was a member of an internet support group and had revealed to Steven the most intimate details of her thoughts about her marriage to Derek, in particular her inability to have another child after the death of their first and how she felt she was drifting away from her husband. Suspecting that Steven was making use of the internet to gain access to her and his personal financial data, Derk decided to stalk him, burgled into his house in the hope of finding sufficient evidence to help the police nail him or alternatively to confront him face to face to demand him to pay back the huge amount of money which he thought Steven had stolen from his bank account to such an extent that he and his wife had to move out from their present mortgaged home for default in payment as all his bank accounts had been frozen. He discovered later that in fact, that Steven himself was also a victim. His name and identity had been also been stolen by the real criminals who used his name as a platform. It nearly led to a killing.

The second story concerns a music loving teenager who is not very good at making friends Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) who was fooled by two of his school mates Frye (Aviad Bernstein) and Shane (Kevin Csolak) who communicated with him on Facebook under the false name of Jessica with a photo of a girl they picked at random on the internet and then invited him to post a picture of his penis with words that he is prepared to be her love slave. The following day, his photo was posted in a social network so that the entire school population saw it and he was the made the butt of malicious jokes and snickers. He hanged himself in his bedroom. His absentee lawyer father Rich Boyd (Jason Bateman) was surprised and shocked and started to check out the whole thing. He continued to communicate with that fictitious "Jessica" . The real culprits responded as if they did not know that his son was in a coma in hospital but finally Frye could not resist the temptation of seeing how Ben was at the hospital when he was seen by Rich. Rich then tracked him down and gave him a real thrashing, until his father returned just in time to stop him. His father Mike was the cyber detective in the first story. 

The third story relates how a TV reporter (played by Hope Davis) of a small local TV network made an exposé about an internet racket selling sex chat services through young male teenagers. The investigative news reports proved a hit and CNN asked for permission to put it through their news network. This caught the attention of the FBI which stepped in. The story is about the delicate balance between need of a journalist to secure the personal trust of persons who are persuaded to give information of how cyber porn network works and the needs of law enforcement. The lady reporter involved knew that she was treading a thin red line but could not completely detach herself from what she thought was the the personal welfare of her informant Kyle (Max Thieriot).  She probably felt a pang of conscience about having to a certain extent exploited him for the benefit of herself as a journalist and for her company and tried her best to ease her conscience by "helping" him , after having revealed the whereabouts of his organization to the FBI and nearly got herself killed in the process by continuing to keep in touch with him now under "false pretenses" (?) that she was genuinely concerned about him. But when she finally found him, Kyle who had developed some genuine feelings for her, denounced her for the hypocrite that she was when she rejected his request to go away with him to live another new life.

Though not superb, the three stories do interweave quite well together with the skillful editing by Percy Lee, keeping the suspense going until the truth of the three dramas finally exploded before our eyes. An excellent Hollywood production. It invites us to think a little more both about how cyber networks are corroding any meaningful personal communication and its risks for all kinds of frauds.The director did not offer any solutions though. Can we blame him? With the mounting ease of communicating with others through internet technology, are we not ironically drifting further and further apart because of the "anonymity" of our real personal identities? Are we not losing touch with one another? Have we not become even more disconnected from one another in all sorts of ways? Apart from the cliché that we must become more aware of the potentially destructive power of the internet, are there really any easy solutions?