By Terry Sherwood
Cryptocurrency, the pressures of money trading and the lure of e fortunes. Oddly or providential The Coder (2024) comes out just when in the UK News a young trader is going to prison for smacking up his ridiculously expensive vehicle after a lavish dinner and killing a female companion that he left still alive in the wreckage.
The short fifteen-minute film The Coder (2024) draws upon Director Will Crouse’s experience in the IT industry and combines it with an obvious enjoyment of visual storytelling. Mary is the anchor of the tech start-up the primary programmer runs it all along the razor line of stunning success or catastrophic failure. Like high-functioning people in that industry, programmers, coders and game development people suffer from high burnout rates. Fragile as she is, Mary is a genius who suffers from mental health trouble.
She is working in a crypto start-up company that her boss Thad wants to drive into the financial stratosphere as he has a meeting with a major investment company. The company is having technical transaction troubles and angry emails from investors as jobs begin to queue up on screen. Mary meanwhile is fracturing herself with reoccurring images of a grinning Thad crunching on her medication and those figuratively speaking ‘Black Dogs’ in the form of voices telling her that she is a failure.
The situation is becoming desperate as translations pile up with no end in site so Mary has to find the solution with her team desperately asking for direction. Mary takes the risk of stopping the impending system crash of the company yet pays a terrible price for a personal crash yet somehow frees her.
The Coder works well with a strong cast of Abbey Toot, Mickey O’Sullivan, Sean Kazarian, Yuchi Chiu, and James Dawson in the principal roles. The action moves well, with rapid dialogue cuts and often naturalistic dialogue delivery which heighten a sense that the camera is a third intruder into the proceedings.
My concern is that mental health in this film is treated lightly as a source of breakdown for comedic purposes much like making a person with a speech impediment become a moment of lightness. To the film’s credit it does mention in the opening credits that flashing etc. could cause seizures and for the audience to beware. Many people cope quite well with their illness and can do the job, however in this case it would negate the drama. Like the ‘tight tank topped’ bloody ‘ Final Girl” the image that mental illness is a way out or a fall back position of a story keeps coming back.
Bloody Flicks 