Review of Code 8 (2019) by Disembodied — 29 Aug 2020

It's far from perfect, but what holds this film back was mostly how it had to climb its way here out of nothing. It was a passion project by a small group of people and it certainly has a ton of heart. I will grant that it's very amateurish, but they had so little to work with, I'd be remiss if I didn't commend the outcome. A real lemonade from lemons production. Look, maybe a year or two ago, I wouldn't be saying this... but this film got a hell of a lot more topical in 2020 than it was in 2019. Police brutality and an abused underclass really hit harder than they used to. This is a bog standard crime drama with a speculative fiction twist. Visualize this movie as a sandwich. The writing, the dialogue, the character archetypes, the tropes, hell the entire plot is the bread. You don't watch it for that; all of that is a vehicle for the premise: Do you want to see a grim reflection of our world where the strife wrought by class prejudice gets turned up to 11? If so, this is the film for you.

There's a romantic agony to watching the plight of our antiheroes as they struggle to make ends meet in an authoritarian police state that not only turns the entire population against them, but dials the pressure so high that they practically have to cannibalize one another. So, if you feel a yearning for solidarity with people who are struggling like you are, this is yet another way the movie might be for you.

For how unsettling and tragic their world is, this "crime" plot might as well be a slice of life. A window into how an entire underclass of people are forced to live - a reflectoin of what people in real life call "The Trap". When you aren't allowed to survive above board, you have to scrape by under the table. When you can't afford to live clean, you have to live dirty. The whole thing is a cautionary tale, and PERHAPS it's a bit too on-the-nose - I can grant that! - but it's a cautionary tale that NEEDS to be told: The choices we make as a society have consequences. If those in positions of authority push people down, then those people must undercut that authority.

I don't know if I could classify my appreciation for this film as "schadenfreude" the way I would normally use that word, because usually it implies watching bad people get what's coming to them. But in this rare case, the itch that this film scratches for me is the feeling of validation, seeing other people struggling and scrambling and watching the world they live in shudder with the strain. If it could be said that this film could only get one thing right, it's that corruption above creates corruption below. It fits. It belongs. It resonates. If you can't see yourself in it, then I have trouble believing you're a person.