Disconnect (2013)

Disconnect arrives from 2012, a year when the culture still believed the internet was a thing that happened to people, like weather. Henry Alex Rubin assembles three interlocking stories about screens and the damage they do, and the result is a well-acted, carefully built piece of sermonizing. The cast is deep: Jason Bateman as a father hunting his son's tormentors, Paula Patton as a reporter chasing a story about an underage chat-room performer, Alexander Skarsgard and Andrea Riseborough as a couple hollowed out by grief and identity theft. Everyone suffers handsomely. Everyone learns.

The film's central argument is that we have traded presence for connectivity, and it states that argument out loud, repeatedly, in case the parallel editing did not land. Critics at the time called it preachy in spots, and they were being generous. The moral is not implied. It is announced. There is a modest streak of suspicion toward institutions here, the chat-room operation that monetizes a runaway teenager, the newsroom that pressures its reporter to cooperate, the identity thief who preys on the bereaved. These are framed as failures of conscience, not of economics. The film is angry at cruelty, which is a safe thing to be angry at.

On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the film is mostly quiet. Its ensemble is diverse in the ordinary way that ensembles in 2012 were diverse, and race is never a subject the screenplay chooses to examine. The women are given interiority and resolve, though no thesis. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental concern, no engagement with body image or neurodivergence, and no historical argument of any kind. What remains is a cautionary tale with good performances, sincere, tidy, and convinced that saying the thing is the same as proving it.