Benjamin Dickinson’s dark comedy is the black-and-white love child of Black Mirror and Mad Men. In the very near future, a worker at a hip advertising and branding agency gets a new assignment — testing new “augmented reality” glasses for a client. These glasses enable a sort of hybrid of video recording and playback, assorted Internet functions and the ability to alter experiences visually. The new toy comes at an opportune time for David (Dickinson), who is bored with his yoga-teacher girlfriend, and obsessing over his best bro’s girl. If you guessed that David uses his new glasses for inappropriate virtual-sex stuff that spills over into his “real” life, you’d be right. Shot in wide screen, Control is stylish, but it veers from clever to obvious to irritating enough to miss the mark.
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2016.
