At this point, Andrew Niccol has become synonymous with weird dystopias. Gattaca, Truman Show, In Time, Lord of War... even The Host, based on a Stephenie Meyer novel. Now he’s making a dystopia about our surveillance state, with his In Time co-star, Amanda Seyfried.


Anon, his next dystopia, comes on the heels of Good Kill, which was actually a dystopia set in the here and now, about drone strikes. With Anon, Niccol returns to the scary near-future that he usually works within. Clive Owen plays a detective in a world where there’s no anonymity or privacy. Everybody is traceable, everything is known. This means no more crime, supposedly. But then Owen meets a woman, played by Seyfried, who has no digital footprint. And this means that a whole new kind of crime is appearing.

Anyway, Niccol’s somewhat stylized paranoid dystopias are sort of an acquired taste at this point—you either love his weird sensibility or you don’t. I kind of love it, and this sounds like he could actually have his finger on the pulse of our over-surveiled culture. [Deadline]

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