Can movies predict the future? This eerie psychological thriller might be doing just that

“I have a young child, a son who’s 14 months old, and I wonder about the world that he’s going to be raised in and how he’ll relate to technology, what privacy he’ll be able to choose for himself, how he’ll relate to screens, whether he’ll have a choice in the matter…”

Hollywood director James Ponsoldt shares the concerns of many parents as they wonder what effects technology will have on future generations.

It’s an apprehension that’s brought to life in his latest film, The Circle, an adaptation of a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers, which explores the power of technology today and in the future, asking tough questions about ethics and privacy.

Emma Watson portrays Mae Holland, an intern who lands a job in a giant internet company (seemingly a combination of Google and Facebook) that supposedly builds its rapport on transparency with customers.

But when the company engages in an odd experiment it reveals a shocking truth, and eventually threatens Mae and those around her. The movie homes in on mankind’s relationship, and some would say overdependence, on technology.

“I can only speak to the experience I had when I first read Dave Eggers’ novel, which was I was horrified. A lot of it was that I saw myself in Mae, in her reliance on her gadgets, her addictions to her gadgets. Just the way she was living her life,” explained Ponsoldt.

“My wife and I were about to have our first child, and I was just asking myself a lot the questions I think a lot of new parents do now: ‘What is the world our son will be born into?’ or ‘Will he have the same choices to live a private life that we had?’ I’m not sure what the answer is.”

Films that dramatise societal behaviour in often satirical portrayals of an uncomfortably not-too-distant future are not uncommon.

Jim Carrey’s 1998 film, The Truman Show, predicted our fascination with reality TV, bordering on the realms of voyeurism. This was a year before Big Brother made its TV debut and years before The Osbournes or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Even president Donald Trump’s shock White House victory was foretold in a now viral 2010 scene in The Simpsons, which has eerily predicted several real-life events.

But Hollywood doesn’t always get it right. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its grand vision of flying cars, and the 1953 flick Project Moon Base, which declared humans would be living on the moon by 1970, missed the mark.

Let’s hope James Cameron’s stark future of deadly dominance at the hands of artificial intelligent robots as featured in The Terminator is not, in fact, prescient.

Only time will tell if this and Eggers’ theory of dystopian surveillance will come to fruition.

Interestingly, however, the author himself once expressed both amazement and dread at how some of the ideas he thought then were improbable, at least in the immediate future, have actually already been realised.

“Most of the technologies and company policies are within the realm of possibility. A few of them have actually transpired since the book came out.”

Also starring: Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Bill Paxton, Patton Oswalt and Karen Gillan Running time: 100 mins
Rating: TBC