Netflix has an over-saturation problem. As the company churns out one original film after another, the difficulty these titles naturally face is how to stand above the pack, and push back against the narrative slowly gaining traction that much of Netflix's original film content is taking the place of the dreaded direct-to-video format - albeit on a much grander scale.
True, films of note still appear, but increasingly for every Meyerowitz Stories, My Happy Family or Mudbound, there's a Mute, War Machine or, sadly, Anon, Netflix's latest feature.
The pedigree behind Anon is certainly there – Andrew Niccol is something like sci-fi cult royalty for his involvement in 2000s brain-twister Gattaca. Unfortunately, Anon squanders much of that goodwill early on.
A tiresome tech-noir in the vein of a mid-grade Black Mirror episode, the film follows Clive Owen's Sal, a grim-faced detective in a lazily-sketched future metropolis in which all citizens have technologically advanced eyes that supplement the wearer's vision with added information (think Google Glass, but grafted on to your eye).
When Sal comes across Anon (Amanda Seyfried), a woman without any digital footprint tied to some lurid murders, he becomes hopelessly drawn into a world where what he sees may not be entirely trustworthy.
