Director: Ravi Kumar Sinha
Writer: Ravi Kumar Sinha
Cast: Prateek Sultania, Madhuri Braganza, Kiran Lakhani, Kaustubh Kashyap, Pravati Ramachandran
Running time: 30mins
Artificial Intelligence. AI. A dreaded acronym that will no doubt echo through our lives much as the siren haunts the consciousness of the factory worker.
The journey from McLuhan’s Gutenberg galaxy into cyberspace has not represented an unalloyed progress toward peace, love and understanding. How will the great leap forward with AI and its younger sibling quantum computing pan out? I would guess – not well.
OK, I can marvel at AI enabling us to decipher the writing on the carbonised papyrus scrolls in a library at Pompeii, opening up the possibility of our discovering lost works from antiquity. Or I can be amazed by AI helping us to decode the communication of other species. But those will not be the ways most of us interact with the technology.
Instead, more likely coming to your screen in the near future, AI generated facsimiles of those you love, pleading for money after an accident on holiday. If, as has been suggested, quantum physics and AI are soon able to decipher any security code – e-banking and e-commerce and a host of other online activities will all be fucked. Any tenuous trust that has evolved over the internet will be lost.
Yet solutions will be at hand – from those with the most to gain. The winners from the great disruption will be the surveillance state and Big Tech – the same people who opened the Pandora’s Box of AI. The IT titans who we saw genuflecting to the emperor at Trump’s inauguration will have the answers – at a price.
So, AI is very much of the moment. In Singularity, Ravi Kumar Sinha, a young Indian filmmaker addresses the potential threats posed by AI – focusing on the dangers to democratic politics and the electoral process. Singularity is a 30-minute narrative shot in Bangalore and Berlin.
Sinha has worked in film and IT and has directed several shorts and documentaries, but I gather this is his venture into extended film drama. A lot of that experience has been well applied in this new medium, though. Singularity looks great – a credit to the production team. The director did their own editing, and it is crisp and efficient. The cinematography by Sugan Shanmugan is excellent.
The action takes place during the Indian general election of late 2024. An investigative journalist Lavinia (Madhuri Braganza) has uncovered a plot using an AI programme to fix the election – as the plot develops, we learn that another AI programme is working to thwart the fix. In dramatic terms, I think the director made the right call to go for Good AI against Evil AI. Although, reality is somewhat more nuanced. I used positive and negative examples in the introduction, but I could easily imagine Hitler loving an AI programme that told him what his dogs were saying.
Lavinia is married to Kabir (Prateek Sultania), a politician of ministerial rank – it is initially not made clear whether this is at national or state level, but as Kabir subsequently meets with the head of the electoral commission, we assume it is at national level.
The opening scene has Lavinia assassinated in an underground car park. For reasons that are left unclear to the viewer, Kabir goes to a meeting with the commission boss, Bhaskar (Kiran Lakhani) where he also meets Taal (Pravati Ramachandran) a colleague of Lavinia’s who warns him of a plot. Kabir hears the news of his wife’s death and the kidnapping of their young son. In desperation, Kabir turns for help to an old college friend, Raghav (Kaustubh Kashyap). Raghav is an IT super geek, and we discover that serendipitously he is also the creator of the Good AI programme. Kabir and Raghav then proceed with several plot twists and turns to attempt to free Kabir’s son and stymie the election fix.
I would guess for many viewers the movie’s stand out scene would be the opener. The Evil AI is threatening Lavinia as she makes her way to her car. After she locks herself inside the vehicle, the Good AI comes onto her phone and informs her calmly that the Evil AI has hit her up with a nerve agent and that she has only five minutes to live. Braganza struggles somewhat playing the dying woman and comes across as somewhat wooden – but it is a tough call portraying someone in crisis that the audience has just been introduced to. Otherwise, the scene is extremely well achieved. Many of us, at least in the rich world, can imagine a deathbed scene in the terminal care ward of our local hospital where the nursing staff have been replaced by robots who will soothingly tell us we have five minutes of our lives left.
I enjoyed the fact that Sinha did not go into the actual specifics of Indian poltical party allegiance – one can only speculate that Kabir is a member of Modi’s stridently nationalist BJP. The director’s choice is a good one as it makes us focus on the universal rather than the particular. However, given Modi’s penchant for waging lawfare against critical journalists and filmmakers, Sinha’s decision might have been a tactical one to evade Modi’s goons and ensure distribution within India.
One political detail that struck me as odd was when the creator of the Evil AI tells Kabir that it was built with the help of a group of German neo-Nazis. The reference might have been a nod to the film having been partly shot in Berlin, but I would have thought there were more than enough neo-Nazis in the BJP, or willing recruits amongst Modi’s crony capitalists in the Indian IT industry, to have made a homegrown origin more plausible.
There are several aspects of Singularity that viewers will enjoy. However, I had a couple of serious problems with the movie’s production values.
First, I have a lot of sympathy for Sinha as this is their first foray into longer form drama. But I would say that he has tried to pack too much narrative intricacy into only 30 minutes of running time – less would certainly have been more here.
The decision to kill off Lavinia at the start also comes with negative consequences. Firstly, we are given the movie’s most poignant and dramatic scene at its very beginning – in terms of tension, the remaining 25 minutes comes across as a dénouement. Secondly, Lavinia’s early demise does not allow the director to give us insight into her relationship with Kabir. We learn halfway through the film that Lavinia had not told Kabir about her investigation – so we are meant to conclude that she was investigating her own husband. Surely, this key revelation would have fitted far better in a climactic scene at the end of the movie.
A superfluous element that goes nowhere is the introduction of Taal the other investigative journalist – efficiently played by Pravati Ramachandran. The Taal character is a plot device to provide us with information about the Evil AI but for me it came across a distraction from what should have been the key relationship – that between Lavinia and Kabir.
Then, there are the performances. Sultania as Kabir is meant to be an experienced, wily politician, but wanders through most of the scenes wearing an expression of puzzled bewilderment. This might be a result of the actor trying to make sense of the cascade of plot developments they are being asked to interpret, but if so, the production has cast someone out of their depth. It is particularly noticeable in the scene where Kabir learns of his wife’s death, where Sultania is supremely unconvincing.
Lakhani as Bhaskar, the electoral commissioner and (spoiler alert) evil genius, is meanwhile asked to portray a Nietzschean Übermensch. Unfortunately, he plays it so over the top that, for your reviewer, he loses any credibility.
There are some mitigating factors for the cast. Kashyap as Raghav is a fine actor whose speciality appears to be deadpan comedy, and when he enters around halfway through the movie, he steals the show. Yet, as our attention is drawn to Kashyap’s dynamic performance, we realise that the mood of the film has changed into a comedy burlesque which characterises the final scenes played out between Raghav and Kabir. The sharp dichotomy between the playfulness of the latter part of Singularity and the darkness of the first scenes which, after all, feature the murder of woman and the abduction of her child is hard for the viewer to come to terms with.
After I finished watching Singularity, I looked back at the elements of the movie such as the struggle between Good and Evil, the cartoon like characters, the weird transition from drama to humour and realised that I was, in all likelihood, not the filmmaker’s target audience. I would think Sinha is aiming for the streaming market with a focus on an adolescent demographic. The focus is no bad thing as getting younger people to think seriously about the ramifications of AI is a laudable endeavour.
Overall, the director still ought to be congratulated on this first attempt at longer form movie making. Singularity is problematic in many ways, but overall shows a lot of talent. I would be interested to see a future submission, where Sinha could give himself more time to work out his ideas – in a full-length feature format.