Andrea Riseborough, so good as Wallis Simpson in Madonna’s W.E., premiered at Venice last year, has her first substantial American part in this cyber thriller from Henry-Alex Rubin. She plays a young television reporter who, investigating a chatline on the net, finds a teenage boy prepared to do anything she wants for extra payment.
Engineering a meeting, she discovers a porn network not above employing underage kids, many of them from broken homes.
It is possibly unfair to call this edgy and intelligent film just a thriller, since it is clearly determined to be something like an awful warning to the internet generation. It is certainly dangerous out there in Disconnect.
A married couple with a son who will scarcely speak to anyone but his computer gets tormented on another chatline by two pranksters from school. So much so that, when he discovers the hoax, he tries to hang himself. A third strand of the film has a quarrelling couple discovering that their joint use of the net has left them with a $20,000 debt because of card fraud.Everyone’s trying to find out who the culprits are, and there doesn’t seem to be much hope of success.
In the case of Riseborough’s reporter, she has CNN wanting to take the story forward but also the CIA who tacitly accuse her of using illegal wiles to lure the boy into meeting her.
She has to be suspended from work and to promise not to see or speak to the boy again.
Rubin, who made Murderball, the Oscar-nominated documentary about wheelchair rugby, gives his first feature film the decidedly unsmooth, urgent look of a tale that needs to be told in today’s wired world. And his cast, which includes Jason Bateman, Hope Davis and Alexander Skarsgard, repay him with performances to match.
Riseborough, whose Mrs Simpson was the best thing in W.E., plays her part with the confidence of a veteran and her scenes with the teenager she rescues from a fate he doesn’t even recognise as dangerous are among the best in the film.
