INFINITY CHAMBER raises a question that is quite uncomfortable: what if some day in the future, an authoritarian government obtains the technology to penetrate your thoughts and dreams, to get into the deepest crevices of your mind while blurring the boundary between dream and reality?
At present, the most an authoritarian government can do, short of taking your life, is to take your physical freedom and to torture you. "Truth Serums" and such are extremely limited in their effectiveness and not very reliable in extracting secrets.
But the kind of technology shown in this film is at a whole different level. In some sense, it dehumanizes us, because it reduces us to a kind of predictable robot, albeit made of flesh and blood.
To better understand what I mean, consider how the gap between abilities of the human mind and similar ones generated by AI is being reduced with each passing day. Now, the usual way to reduce it is to make the AI more human-like. But an alternative way to reduce the gap is to transform the human mind from this almost mystical source of creative power and insight unique to our species into something that can be manipulated, explored and exploited like a piece of software. Most often, we overlook this angle.
The story concerns a man in the near future by the name of Frank, who in the opening shot is literally shot in the back, and then wakes up in a sparse room to a computer that calls itself Howard. There is very little information at the beginning, but as the movie progresses, we learn more about Frank, his world and Howard, and we also learn that not everything shown to us is real.
I have read reviews that tagged this as a movie that touches upon themes of surveillance or over-surveillance, but it is about so much more than that.
For a good portion of the latter half of the movie, it is not clear what is real and what it not,but the ending, which is one of the most brilliant of any movie I have ever seen (see SPOILER ALERT below), drives home just how unimaginably awesome such a power would be in the hands of a government: if it really possessed this power, you could never again be sure what is real and what is not, and this would transform the Cartesian concept of a Deus deceptor-a malicious demon that tries to deceive you at each step-from an abstract philosophical problem into a pressing and mortifying concrete one.
This theme has been explored by other movies, most famously the MATRIX (1999) franchise (also THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (1999) which had the misfortune of being overshadowed by MATRIX, even though it gives a deeper philosophical treatment of the same theme), but not, as far as I know, in such an intimate way which really drives home just how profoundly life-altering such a power in the hands of a government would be.
Although this movie was made on a shoe-string budget, this is not evident at all. The acting, direction, cinematography and production design were all great.
I feel the movie is underrated because it is a little ahead of its time. We do not yet have to worry about such technology in a realistic sense, and because thinking about it seriously is unsettling, few of us now do.
But the day this could become reality draws closer, and at some point in the future we will have no choice but to deal with it. I hope we will be well-prepared.
Now to the explanation
SPOILER ALERT
It might seem that the ending is ambiguous, but if one takes the subtle hints throughout the movie seriously, it is possible to construct an interpretation that fits everything shown without any ambiguity, as best as I can tell:
The only scene that plays out in reality is the opening shot. After that, Frank is on life-support (similar to how his father had been), kept alive by government authorities, who probe his mind to find out where he had hidden his USB drive.
Instead of trying to hide this information in his mind, he has subtly modified his memory of where he hid it by exchanging aspects of his memory (like waffles for pancakes) in order to mislead the authorities.
All the scenes in the infinity chamber are therefore attempts by the authorities to try to obtain that information from Frank's mind. This is hinted at when we first hear Howard speak, for we hear a human voice morphing into Howard's voice, a human voice which represents the government authority behind Howard.
In order to break Frank, the authorities come up with scenarios that provide hope for Frank, only to be dashed. These scenarios include Howard's reset, the power outage, the first escape and the second escape. These scenarios are basically "games" that the authorities play with Frank's mind to discover his secret.
At the conclusion of the second escape, the government authorities finally succeed in getting Frank to reveal his secret. Once he reveals where he put the USB drive, his mind's imaginings take on a new direction because the government now has what it needed from him.
Hints that the last scene in the coffee bar is not real include the curious personalization and synchronization between the male and female newscaster announcements when they say "we praise your(!) safe return and welcome you back to the new world", the same dog as in the dream version, the nearly identical dialogue between him and the barista as in the previous dreams, and obviously Howard in the last shot.
The change from "Gabby" to "Madelyn" signifies that the government finally got what it wanted and no longer needs to play games with Frank, so what is ostensibly portrayed as a happy end in the final scene actually represents the defeat of Frank's anti-authoritarian resistance; the equivalent of his taking the blue pill in the MATRIX. The authoritarian government won.
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