People say things like “Augmenta is not Main Street, it’s Bedford Avenue,” “You’ve got a boner for the newest face computer,” and, “I was wondering why we don’t hang out more, and then I realized that last year at the Christmas party, I said something to you that might have come off as racist” with admirably straight faces. Last year’s Ex Machina, with which the film shares a few superficial similarities, tackled the Brooklyn bro archetype more vividly, in the form of Oscar Isaac’s billionaire recluse character. But at least Creative Control has quantity on its side. It’s wall-to-wall with digs at an Urban Outfitter-ized professional culture where “content” has ironically come to signify emptiness, and boasts appearances from the likes of Reggie Watts, Himanshu “Heems” Suri, and Vice co-founder (and former ad agency creative director) Gavin McInnes, who gets a surprisingly substantial amount of screen time as David’s supervisor.
Dickinson is a veteran of commercials, and, like his character, directed an ad campaign starring Watts, who plays himself in Creative Control. And this isn’t the director’s first time examining Brooklynite yuppiedom through the lens of the fantastic. His debut feature, First Winter, depicted the end of the world from the perspective of a yoga retreat, whose participants are suddenly forced to fend for themselves as civilization collapses in the distance. (First Winter’s Paul Manza, a real-life yoga instructor with a Friedrich Engels beard, pops up here as Juliette’s workplace rival.) That earlier film was shot on grubby, handheld Super 16 mm with long lenses—a look that was as calculated, in certain ways, as Creative Control’s digital widescreen, in which everything is rendered in black-and-white except the Augmenta interface, which appears in color. Knowingness is the key ingredient, and that includes knowing how to sell an idea, for lack of a better term.
The style is self-conscious to a fault, rife with long takes, slow-motion shots, and snippets of classical music and A Clockwork Orange-esque synthesizer that announce the movie as Kubrick-worshipping “serious cinema,” or a parody of the same. Perhaps it’s too funny in spots to not seem like it’s in on a joke, and too indulgent for that joke to have much of a bite. Future-corporate trappings aside, the only purpose of Augmenta—which comes in the form of a pair of glasses with clear plastic frames—is to visualize the inside of David’s head. Its ability to record and re-mix reality like a sampler stands in for his imagination, and one can’t help but take issue with the way Dickinson and Bloomberg equate fantasy with estrangement, given how much of our lives passes entirely in our heads.
Compare with Spike Jonze’s Her, set in an equally (though more subtly) satirical future; it treats the romance between Joaquin Phoenix’s sad sack and Scarlett Johansson’s AI voice as poignantly real, and speculates whether it qualifies as a relationship for other reasons. Augmenta is largely extraneous to the plot of Creative Control, which mostly deals with David’s lusting for Sophie while he watches Dan repeatedly cheat on her. Take away the high-tech glasses—which, ironically, don’t alter perception so much as represent it—and what you’re left with is a meandering millennial relationship drama of indecision; like quite a few movies about commitment-phobic alter egos, it seems reluctant to commit to a point of view, but benefits from an offbeat sci-fi setting. In the end, it all comes down a cautionary tale call to “real life”—a call that the movie will heed, just as soon as it’s done with this latest scene of David pretending to fuck a polygonal figure to Vivaldi.
