Implanted

A visually appealing thriller with some wonky story issues about a woman implanted with a computer chip that forces her to become a steampunk assassin.

“Implanted” boasts a timely theme on paranoia — about our physical health in a time of pandemic, our deteriorating mental state and the feeling that Big Tech is increasingly encroaching on our lives in ways both big and small.

I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theory nut, but you don’t have to be one to notice how you can talk about something with your wife without ever typing it into a search browser, yet suddenly ads for those products start appearing in your online feed.

Set in a dystopic near-future, Michelle Girolami plays Sarah, a woman who has volunteered for a medical trial by the healthcare giant Dynamic Health Cure, which is developing technology to stop the spread of disease. It involves implanting a computer chip into her spine that will monitor her health status and assist her if she starts to get sick.

Sarah knows it’s a risk — the corporate execs even warn her the experience will be painful — but she agrees to it for the money, which she’s planning to use her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Unfortunately, the LEXX nanochip starts giving her sinister instructions in that deliberately flat, emotionless voice synthesizer tone. It soon ramps up to infiltrating the headquarters of the company that created the chip, stealing secret documents and eventually killing.

Sarah fights an internal battle with LEXX, seeming outwardly to those around her like yet another crazy person on the streets of New York City talking to the voices inside their head. But the evil chip controls her completely, even able to cause Sarah debilitating pain when she fails to comply.

That’s bad enough, but later Sarah finds out there’s a male counterpart with his own chip — who even speaks to him in a man’s computer voice — stalking her and making sure she carries out her missions.

It’s a slick-looking low-budget film, with some startling camera work and terrifying flashbacks to Sarah’s implantation surgery. Director Fabien Dufils, who co-wrote the script with David Bourgie, has an eye for dark, steampunk-ish imagery and making us feel like threats are pushing in from every side.

Girolami, with her pixie haircut and hollow eyes, makes for an intriguing main character, projecting both vulnerability and the ability to seem threatening when under LEXX’s grip. At one point she enlists the aid of a company executive (Sunny Koll), at first through coercion but later with sympathy, and it seems like Sarah might have a chance of breaking free.

The story construction is rather convoluted with a lot of repetitive encounters and scenes of Sarah hunched in torment as flashbacks blink through her mind. I couldn’t escape the feeling this movie would have worked better as a longish short film, say in the 35-minute range, than an hour-and-a-half feature.

“Implanted” raises some tantalizing possibilities, but only manages to carry through on those ideas inconsistently.