As luck would have it, iBoy (the latest offering from Netflix) was the third recent film I saw in as many weeks that involved rape as a major plot point. The first was Paul Verhoeven’s incandescent Elle , where Isabelle Huppert has all but bagged the major awards of the year with her portrayal of the titular character. The second film took the other extreme: this was Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil , where the raped woman (Yami Gautam), grotesquely, consoles her sulking husband (Hrithik Roshan) who’s avoiding her. She even offers to leave him if it’d make him feel better. Meanwhile, her state of mind, her feelings are anybody’s guess: not one minute of screen time is afforded to these trifles. iBoy , based on the YA novel of the same name by Kevin Brooks, falls in between these two, both quality-wise and in terms of the sensitivity of the rape portrayal. Please note, however, that being better than Kaabil is not and will never be an achievement ( Raees , the other big Bollywood release of the month, couldn’t even manage this, but that’s a different story).
Directed by Adam Randall, iBoy begins with young Tom (Bill Milner) stumbling upon a gang rape in the London inner city neighbourhood he lives in. While fleeing from the thugs who’re raping his neighbour Lucy (Maisie Williams), he gets shot in the head. Miraculously, not only does Tom survive, he wakes up with fragments of his phone embedded in his head, giving him what can only be described as ‘smartphone superpowers’. He basically has the ability to manipulate technology: he can hack your phone, get into your email, your browsing history and so on. Are you quaking in your boots yet?
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In the second half, Tom potters about trying to get higher and higher up the gangster ladder, desperate for revenge against the men who raped Lucy. The always excellent Rory Kinnear (Frankenstein’s monster from Penny Dreadful ) appears out of the blue and livens up proceedings for a bit before the film hurtles towards a fairly predictable climax.
For a film titled iBoy , there’s surprisingly little dialogue that’s actually about technology; again, not surprising given the implausible premise. You don’t want to get into stuff you cannot possibly explain. And the one extended sequence in the film that’s firmly grounded in technology is deeply problematic. When Tom wants to extract revenge against a bully at school, he uploads a video of the boy masturbating on a screen during the morning assembly, so that the entire school is party to the ensuing shame. Again and again, we are being fed a very precise notion: That technology begets power by tapping into its capacity to inflict humiliation on a grand scale, and that this is the most palpable way technology affects us. In Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam , a boy films his female friend surreptitiously while she’s in the shower. He then blackmails her with it, threatening to upload the video on the internet. In Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly , a cuckolded middle-aged man watches raunchy videos of his actress wife non-stop, to the point where he cannot get it up without the stimulus; a source of great shame for him. Kinnear himself played the British Prime Minister on the very first episode of Black Mirror . His character was blackmailed into having sex with a pig, live on national television.
It’s strange that in 2017, technology as a plot device can seemingly only lead to this collective hall of shame. Perhaps Elon Musk ought to extend his TV career beyond The Big Bang Theory and offer a word or two to scriptwriters around the planet.