Parents' Guide to Distorted

This thriller owes obvious debts to movies like A Clockwork Orange, The Manchurian Candidate, and more, but all that borrowing yields little interest. Distorted has a promising premise: that near-future tech in our homes could someday control us. It aims for a '70s paranoia vibe, which could be fun. But style is heavily favored over substance here. The film is characterized by seemingly endless repetitions of strobe-speed flashes of images that are intended to be disturbing. It gets annoying, then borderline painful. And the central relationship is woefully underdeveloped, which makes the ending all but nonsensical.

There don't seem to be rules to the movie's world, and it has more questions than answers. Not much seems deeply thought out. You may find yourself put on guard right away when a fancy representative of the building mispronounces "feng shui," and it doesn't get more deeply researched from there (e.g., Lauren's disorder is described using antiquated terms). The acting, despite the presence of Ricci and Cusack, is unremarkable. Ultimately, director Rob King's cinematic assault on viewers includes overzealous sound design, nail-on-head overuse of the song "Beautiful Dreamer," and that off-putting strobe editing. A little would have gone a longer way and might have left more room to explore the characters' relationships.