OtherLife is a 2017 Australian film loosely based on the novel Solitaire
, directed by Ben C. Lucas, and starring Jessica De Gouw, T.J. Power, and Thomas Cocquerel. Ren Amari (Gouw) has founded company OtherLife with Sam (Power), which offers a nanotechnology method of inserting scripted memories into a human brain via drops of black liquid into their eyes. Ren and Chris are in conflict with each other over the how this technology is used and marketed. Chris wants to pursue a potential contract with the US Justice system where convicted criminals could experience a virtual confinement where their entire sentence is served in a short period of time, but Ren wants nothing to do with that concept. Meanwhile, Ren is secretly using company resources to pursue the possibility of using this technology to revive her brain-dead brother, Jared, by having him experience his drowning incident, but with a built-in choice to allow him to not drown.
After a sexual encounter with her fellow employee, Danny (Cocquerel), Ren lets him try out the sample adventure of a ski slope, but then gets distracted by a work email when he asks if he can try it again, only for him to grab a capsule containing Jared's drowning experience, and to go into a seizure, and die. Ren is offered an alternative sentencing, allowing the Justice system to use her technology for virtual confinement with her as a test subject, doing a year's sentence in the span of a minute. Except, after a year, the counter of days served resets to zero again... and then Ren manages to break out of her cell, revealing she's in an actual cell in a warehouse, and that Sam has seized her company from her in her absence...
Tropes in this film include
- And I Must Scream: The prison version of OtherLife that Sam conspires to trap Ren in. It is a solitary confinement cell with a digital timer on the wall, counting up the days for one whole year, at which point Ren will supposedly be released. She waits the agonizing amount of time for the days to tick up to 365, at which point the timer resets to zero and starts counting up again, and she has no way out...
- Bittersweet Ending: Danny is really dead. And, to prevent misuse of her technology, Wren ensures that the OtherLife company will go out of business.
- Fake Memories: What kicks off the plot. OtherLife has developed a means of inserting artificial memories into human beings. In practice, the implanted memories are more in line with a mental artificial world, based on whatever the designer has concocted, where Year Inside, Hour Outside is in full effect for the person experiencing them.
- Holodeck Malfunction: Early on, Ren gets trapped in the snowboarding simulation, which keeps resetting and running again, leading to her spending multiple days in it before her co-worker Byron realizes what is going on and sets her free. This also proves that a subject can experience that much time without physical harm, which opens the door to the incarceration option. As it turns out, Ren's "escape" is also a matter of this trope, with the glitch being what traps her in her incarceration scenario and her being able to modify the simulation to escape.
- Laser-Guided Karma: At the end of the film, after Chris forces another dose of potentially indefinite incarceration on Ren to learn how she changed the scenario, she escapes and forces him into the same experience.
- Mind Prison: Ren agrees to serve a year in simulated solitary confinement over causing Danny's death with her unsanctioned use of the drug. She does, but escapes when it seemingly resets, discovering the cell was real, part of a ruse to get rid of her so Sam could take over the business. After this, she's told it's being used commonly for simulated imprisonment, with the Australian government proposing even 10 to 20 year sentences with it. One US Senator even wants multiple life sentences to run this way, adding up into centuries of simulated incarceration. Ren is deeply dismayed hearing this, since she knows how hard even a year was. Later it turns out that she really was in simulated prison, and her "escape" was a glitch. She puts Sam into the same scenario for a "year" in revenge, nearly killing him. It all occurs only in minutes or hours at most.
- Professor Guinea Pig: Ren seems to be the only person who ever had the product tested on her outside of her experimentation with Jared, and Danny's fatal experience.
- The Rule of First Adopters: When listing how their memory technology will be used, Cass points out, somewhat ruefully, that porn will definitely be one of the uses.
- Suicide Is Painless: Ren's scenario to awake Jared ends with him choosing to die.
- Workaholic: Ren is obsessed with the OtherLife technology, putting her every spare hour into it, and often neglecting Danny in the process. It is one of those moments of neglect that results in his drowning experience.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: Because the scenarios involve injecting memories that can be experienced at the speed of thought, all of the initial scenarios are intended to give several hours of experience in the course of a few minutes. The incarceration idea relies on this to allow someone to service their prison sentence in a very short amount of time.
