Doc Corner: 'Another Body'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Well, this is upsetting.

When college student Taylor Klein receives a chat message from a male friend with a PornHub link, she naturally assumes he’s been hacked. Turns out he is informing her that a sex tape of her has appeared online. Except that it’s no such thing. It is a fake. A deepfake; a video in which her likeness—taken from a social media sweep of images wherein she eats ice-cream, kisses her boyfriend and spends time with family—has been digitally imposed upon pornography. We’ve certainly come a long way from putting a celebrity’s head on a porn star’s body and saying it’s legit. Several sad yet logical steps down the ladder to the bottom of the barrel.

Like David’s France’s radical Welcome to Chechnya, directors Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn have used technology to disguise the faces of its participants (the store at Another Body’s core sadly spreads much wider than Taylor, a pseudonym for the real subject). This is a smart and powerful way of utilizing the very AI technology that they seek to uncover. Not just because it disguises the identities of women who have already been publicly violated in ways that will affect them for years to come, but also because it shows off the very insidiousness at the technology’s heart.

That many audiences likely won’t pick up on it only makes it all the more haunting. It’s not until you start looking up close and noticing the fuzzy lines and the lack of clarity when they move that it sticks out. And by the time that comes in the movie, the audience will already be well and truly on the side of its protagonists. In the real world, however, by the stage people notice how wonky these digital avatars are, the damage has already been done and the deepfake pornography featuring their likeness has already been seen by potentially millions of people, potentially downloaded by friends and colleagues and disseminated across the globe.

Anybody who has lived long enough in the online world is recognise the dangers that it radiates on a constant, ever-whirring basis. Whether its deepfake pornography, revenge porn, casual as well as explicitly targeted misogyny and sexism. The way death threats and cruelty aren’t just there hiding away but up front in the comments of the most benign of content, even promoted into our daily social media feeds by greedy pigs desperate to make money off of the social miserabilism that feeds at the trough of humanity’s worst impulses.

That there appears to be nothing that can be done about it from just about any angle makes for viewing that has no real ability to leave the viewer with anything other than sadness. That the story at the centre of Another Body kind of has nowhere to go other than where it does, left me with a similar feeling. Beyond the horrors of how deepfake and AI technology is being used as some people’s personal vendetta tool, it’s hard to really recommend the film as a movie to sit down and watch for 80 minutes. It’s good, yes. It’s well-made and lands of important ideas, but good grief. I’m not sure if Compton and Hamlyn really knew where the take the story of Taylor Klein—they don’t delve too deeply into the life she has/had with her friends, many of whom we are told appear to remain friends with the man is suggested has done this to her and other women with whom he had para-social relationships with. It doesn’t dig into the police investigation or take on a broader focus beyond Taylor. All of which kind of leaves an unsatisfied effect.

As a spotlight on an issue that is only going to increase in virality, Another Body works. But it feels as if it barely scratches the surface of not just deepfake pornography run rampant, but also of its central figure’s world.

Release: Available to rent on iTunes, Amazon and Spectrum.

Award chances: Not the sort of title the Academy’s branch typically goes for, but I can see it appearing through the season as its hot topic issue continues to be ever-present in our lives. It would be curious to see if this can make similar headway into the visual effects category as Welcome to Chechnya, too.