After hacking and clearing a kept woman’s (Sasha Calle) bank account, hacker Cole (Dane Dehaan) realises the money actually belongs to her wealthy, mob-adjacent DA (Jeffrey Donovan).
With her life in danger, the guilt-ridden hacker decides to put himself in danger to get the money back…
I watched this movie because Sasha Calle was in it. I did not even know it existed until I heard it brought up on a podcast.
Usually, choosing a movie because good-looking people are in it is a bad sign.
In this case? Not a bad watch.
Wardriver is a noir. Its lead is a withdrawn hacker on the margins of society, but he might as well be a loner anyjob - he is in a bad place, and is clearly in need of a change in circumstance.
In Calle’s Sarah, Cole sees a chance for redemption. He is clearly infatuated, but the character at least has the integrity to confess his guilt.
The film gets a lot of suspense out of basic aspects of contemporary life - like wifi. There are multiple scenes premised on the lack of good bandwidth.
There is also a near constant sense of surveillance. Cole is constantly trying to avoid showing his face - including to his fellow hackers. Identity is as valuable as money in this world.
The movie this one reminded me of the most was Lying and Stealing: Smalltime criminals get drawn into a bigger scheme.
This is a small scale movie about people forced to scrabble to survive, and have to turn to alternative revenue streams to improve their own status.
While nothing about the film is that standout, it gets a lot of suspense out of basic aspects of contemporary life - like wifi.
There is one key set piece premised on Cole having to move closer to his target in order to get a stronger internet connection.
In scenes like this, or the extended sequence of Coke skimming money from ATMs, that Wardriver approaches a certain level of process as poetry.
A quiet, understated thriller, Wardriver is ultimately brought down by formulaic plotting, but at its best, it captures the basic anxieties of contemporary online life - how much we depend on ephemeral infrastructure, and how easily it can be stolen or wiped from existence.
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