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A few films this year will surprise one, as did “Latency” (2024). Written and directed by James Croke, “Latency” has a Black Mirror-like quality. Hana is a professional gamer and is plagued by acute agoraphobia, so she prefers to remain isolated in her apartment. A new gaming equipment she receives for testing connects to her brain waves. Soon, her reality becomes distorted with paranoia despite it having bettered her gaming experience. The apartment conjured up for the setting of this sci-fi horror-thriller is perfect – dimly lit and littered with Hana’s things.
The writing also gives space to explore all facets of Hana’s character and not make this story feel like a conventional tirade against the inculcation of AI into our everyday things of use. Keep an open mind, and “Latency” (2024) will actually leave you feeling spooked. This may be light entertainment for horror fans, and some others may find it eerily similar to “All of Us Strangers” (2023), but watch it. For all the mind-bending thrills it has to offer, come to us afterward as we explore the brief snatches of reality and Hana’s hallucinations in detail in this article below.
Latency (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The film begins with an action sequence in which a woman, Hana (played by Sasha Luss), fights monsters. She steps around a dimly lit apartment, shooting at monsters that are pouring in from all directions towards her. Soon, we realize that she is on a call with someone, helping them run a test on a game they may be developing. She helps identify a glitch in the current edition of the game, signing off with talks of paychecks. This establishes that Hana is a professional gamer who helps run tests on developing games.
Next, we get a glimpse into her life in the apartment as she grabs a soft drink from her fridge and spends some time playing an old Tetris game. When she wakes up next, she attends to a call at her door. There’s a parcel for her, and the delivery guy will need her to sign it for him. This is when we start to realize that Hana suffers from acute agoraphobia. She requires some time to muster up the courage to peep through her door and sign the delivery. While outside, she talks with a girl who wishes to be let inside her apartment and play with her, but Hana promptly denies the same.
Hanna waits for Jen (played by Alexis Ren) to show up before she can unpack the parcel. Once Jen arrives with food and all, they set out to unpack the delivery. Sent from Omnia, it is a device that one needs to wear on one’s head. The Omnia is, in part, an electroencephalography device that uses neural imaging to read, measure, and decode characteristic patterns of the brain. Furthermore, it is a brain-computer interface capable of controlling every device and program she uses, aiming to reduce her reaction time to zero. The manual further suggests that Hana complete all the exercises given before using the Omnia for other programs, and once that is done, the Omnia shall work exclusively for her brain.
The exercises begin with a mere typing test and end with a test where Hana is meant to draw some blood out of her skin using a blunt object. Jen is both amazed and alarmed, but Hana is clearly fascinated by it and is going to finish up these exercises, even if that means ignoring Jen and her cooked food. There’s also a conversation with the landlord indicating that Hana hasn’t paid rent for a while now. But later in the film, she tells Jen that she’s willing to pay the rent for the whole of the upcoming year or more, showing no indication that she wants to get out of the apartment anytime soon.
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Meanwhile, Hana keeps talking with this young girl she had met in the hallway through her door when she broaches the idea of lending her the Tetris game she liked playing as a child. In one scene, Hana digs out a box from her wardrobe that consists of old photos and objects from her childhood, especially a tennis ball, and she gets emotional. The very next moment, she and Jen engage in some light music and dance inside Hana’s apartment.
However, strange things start happening soon afterward. While flossing her teeth, she sees herself turn into a blood-soaking monster, but that she figures is just a dream. Soon, we are made aware of a creepy supernatural female presence inside Hana’s apartment, always making her feel that someone’s around. It begins when the tennis ball she had earlier fetched from her memory box rolls onto the floor of the drawing room by itself.
Her conversation with the landlord about rent again proves that she has lost all sense of time by living in isolation. She signs up for a tournament in a game and gears up to play it alongside Jen. Hana also gets scared when a hand reaches out toward her briefly from her computer screen. She shares a moment with Jen where she tells her about her mother and her agoraphobic tendencies, discussing how that affected her as a child.
When Jen leaves her apartment later, Hana spots the girl in the hallway and is about to give her the Tetris game when she realizes that there’s no girl and the door to her apartment has been left open. Hana steps outside, but soon, the supernatural presence haunts her. She comes back in, locking the door after her. Hana is slowly starting to lose her grip on reality now, unable to decipher the AI illusions from the supernatural and the real, including Jen’s presence inside her apartment.
What is the movie Latency about?
“Latency” (2024) is about an agoraphobic professional gamer living at her own pace in isolation and earning bucket-loads of money for testing new games and gaming equipment. She has one friend, Jen, who lives in the apartment above hers and visits her from time to time to collect her mail, buy her groceries, spend some time with her, and cook her food. When she receives a piece of new gaming equipment to test, she starts to realize that she is losing her grasp on reality and hallucinating about a supernatural presence in her apartment. However, soon, it becomes difficult to tell the real apart from the unreal as her past trauma, isolation, and the AI technology of the gaming equipment start affecting her.
Why is Hana agoraphobic?
To begin with, agoraphobia is a kind of anxiety disorder in which a person fears and tries their best to avoid places, situations, and events that they believe will make them feel trapped, helpless, or embarrassed. In severe cases of agoraphobia, like with our protagonist Hana here, a person encloses themselves in their home because they believe it to be the only safe space.
Agoraphobia can arise from several reasons. However, with Hana, we come to know that her mother was acutely agoraphobic, too. She grew up around her mother, who never let her out of the apartment to play with other children. Ever since her mother passed away, she started spending more and more time indoors with her game of Tetris to keep her away from the harsh reality of her mother’s death. In her case, it seems to be genetic as well as a result of past traumas.
Who is Jen, and what happens to her in the end?
Jen is Hana’s only friend in the apartment building where she lives. Jen lives in apartment number 808 and occasionally comes down to Hana’s to help her with her everyday chores, including collecting mail, restocking veggies, cooking food, etc. They seem to be sharing a very close relationship, almost homosocial in its appeal. They are partners who play games and share their lives. However, just as Hana figures out that she is losing her grip on reality and is in the clutches of both AI technology from gaming equipment and a supernatural presence inside the apartment, Jen goes missing from her life.
Despite her best efforts, which also involve climbing up to Jen’s apartment, Hana is unable to spot her. When she finally does, Jen seems to have become a rotting corpse in Hana’s bathtub. We come to understand that Hana murdered Jen with a screwdriver during one of the days when she was visiting her, and she hid her body in her bathtub. But because Hana is losing touch with reality due to her mental condition, she lives in denial of her heinous crime.
Who is the young girl Hana speaks in the hallway?
Right at the start of the film, Hana hears the voice of a girl in the hallway who insists that she play with her. We also see a glimpse of the girl. She mostly appears as a dark black shadow, and we hear a young girl’s voice in the hallway. Sometime later, while Hana is conversing with Jen about the girl who wants to play with Jen, the latter casually says that she hasn’t seen any children around in the building ever.
Hana, however, seems to be softening towards the girl, proposing to give her the game of Tetris that she used to play with during her childhood. However, as Hana starts to lose her grasp on reality, we become more and more doubtful about the real-life presence of this girl. Finally, in the end, it becomes clear that the little girl is Hannah’s projection of her own childhood self, who was forced to stay within the confines of her apartment building by her agoraphobic mother while she was alive.
Latency (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
What Happens to Hana in the End?
When Jen visits Hana next, the latter is already quite fragile in terms of her mental health and shabby in terms of her appearance. She seems to be constantly hallucinating. At this point, she is unsure if Jen ever visited her in the apartment when she won the tournament. Hana thinks Jen is in her bathroom but is unable to spot her inside; only the shower has been left running.
She tries to contact the Omnia service center to ask about possible psychological symptoms that she may be suffering from as a result of using the device. But they tell her that it is merely a device that follows instructions and has no brain in itself. Hana eats the noodles Jen had packed for her in the fridge but finds out that they are rotting and have worms in them now, indicating that a good number of days may have passed since Jen’s last visit to Hana’s apartment.
Hana also periodically keeps checking on the wound in her hand, the spot where she had to cut herself for the exercise. The area is clearly getting infected with germs, starting an infection on her skin. She starts to miss Jen as she receives an award in her mail and realizes how much Jen would have loved to be around. She tries to do a daring thing – climb up to Jen’s apartment to figure out how she is doing. However, before she can step out, she hears a strange numbing sound play on her speakers and then finds an injured Jen in her drawing room.
But she is unsure if it is the reality. She tries to take the Omnia device off her head, but no matter how hard she tries, it seems to be auto-replacing itself there. Hana is driven to madness and convinces her to walk out of the apartment. However, before she leaves, she takes one last look inside her bathroom and finds Jen’s rotting corpse in her bathtub. The entire apartment looks dilapidated now as if some force has wrecked the place completely, forcing Hana to wonder how long she has been living in this mess.
Hana finally steps out to go to Jen’s, but it turns out to be another one of her dreams. She wakes up in front of her computer console, bleeding from her nose. Now, Hana is sure that she cannot escape. She is also possibly the murderer of her best friend, whom she possibly murdered on the last day Jen visited her while she was playing the tournament. Hana gets her Tetris out and starts to play with it, going back to what she used as a child to avoid the trauma of her mother’s death. The police come knocking at her door, hold her down, and prepare to take her in for the murder of Jen.
But all Hana does is think about her mother and keep playing her game until they prepare to force her out of the apartment. Hana screams echoingly, injuring the police officers, and the door to her apartment closes in on them. Is Hana successfully arrested? We don’t know. The film is so much from Hana’s perspective that at one point, the lines between reality and her imagination become blurred, so the final scene may have been Hana’s form of perceiving this incident, but we cannot tell that for sure. The supernatural presence in her apartment is surely a hint at her past trauma from her mother’s death and the effect on her childhood that Hana had kept at bay with games, a part of her memory that gets unlocked due to the usage of this AI device, Omnia.
