Interactive cinema cheerleader Paul Raschid’s last work The Gallery in 2022, cannily used the format to compare and contrast two fraught eras: Thatcher’s and post-Brexit Britain. So it’s a disappointment to see his latest outing, Hello Stranger, narrow its scope to a cheesy trial-by-internet that lacks the social commentary of Squid Game, from which it nabs its masked, filtered-voice tormentor.
Cam (George Blagden) is a shut-in working on assorted remote assignments from a hermetically sealed, computer-controlled London apartment. His main companion is Sasha, the digital assistant that runs his life (voiced by either Derek Jacobi or Yasmin Finney). Depending on whether you opt for being in a couple or single at the appropriate fork, hypothetical American girlfriend Mimi (Christina Wolfe) or neglected young brother Alfie (Danny Griffin) are the significant humans Cam is keeping neurotically at arm’s length. He prefers the company of online randomers plucked from a Chatroulette-style app called Hello Stranger that fatefully serves him up an anonymous sadist who locks him into his flat and forces him to play three games.
There’s a hint of engagement with the zeitgeist in the references to digital-age isolation in the preamble, as Cam flits through conversations with an academic researcher, a London wide boy and an elderly influencer. But little of it filters meaningfully into the main event, where you must choose to play either solo or against other players. (A single playthrough takes just under an hour.) These games err towards binary, right-or-wrong responses that aren’t conducive to opening up dramatic avenues; where The Gallery had a rich tree of cascading consequences, the bareness of the structure here is exposed in how often Raschid reverts to simple bouts of paper-scissor-stones that express nothing about the games master, or the rats in his maze.
Lead actor Blagden at least holds the centre with an ennui that suggests a man whose edges have been rubbed off by digital saturation. But Hello Stranger is otherwise unengaging in cinematic terms – and its interactive side feels hobbled (despite the inclusion of a gaming mode, which offers up five rudimentary video games as part of the challenges). To judge this ordeal on its own reptile-brain terms, even the smorgasbord of possible deaths for Cam is repetitive and flavourless.
• Hello Stranger is at Genesis cinema, London, as part of its Interactive film club until December, and available on Steam on 29 May.
