- Branden Mayer

Lapsis is an ambitious and impressive micro-budget sci-fi film that tackles how automatization and corporate greed mix to bring the gig-economy to a new low for those already struggling to get by. In Lapsis, we follow Ray, a working-man who has taken up a sketchy weekend job laying cable for the corporate quantum computing network in hopes of earning enough money to get his brother a nebulous treatment plan for his even more nebulous modern disorder.

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Despite the serious and oppressive subject matter, Lapsis is full of charming characters and some wickedly barbed satire, with the first two acts constantly throwing fun scenes and engaging concepts at you. Lapsis is elevated immensely by director and writer Noah Hutton's concise and organic world-building that keeps you pleasantly anxious with how eerily relatable it all is. The set design, costumes and props are all expertly grounded in the familiar and while some contrived feeling plot elements rear their heads in the third act, Lapsis feels greater than the sum of its parts.

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Special credit goes to the main cast, specifically star Dean Imperial, who carries the audience into this world effortlessly and keeps us engaged in his character's relatable struggle to work hard for abetter life. Lapsis is easily one of the best recent examples of a sci-fi film that uses its fiction to reflect our current reality in a way only great science fiction can. While it feels like director Noah Hutton pumps the breaks on the dark reality of his expertly crafted world for the audience’s sake near the end, I’m very excited to see what he does next. If you’re in Canada, you can watch Lapsis on demand through fantasia film festival until September 2nd. If you’re a fan of science fiction or any of this sounds achingly familiar, we suggest you check it out.

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