Cineverse
Available on VOD
Director Peter Webber and his screenwriting team, Barry Hutchison, Alex Lane, and Alexander Gordon Smith, have delivered a work that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of entertainment and contemporary anxiety. The release of DRAGN feels closely tied to the current global climate, where remote and automated warfare has become an increasing part of modern conflict. As these systems filter decision-making through distant interfaces, reducing lives to abstract data, the film’s premise of granting a drone the autonomous “choice” to execute feels less like speculative fiction and more like a reflection of present-day concerns.
In many ways, the bot in question attempts to be a Terminator for the age of algorithmized warfare. It is not a total failure, nor is it a triumph. Rather, it functions as an ontological inquiry: can we ever truly trust a machine programmed to bypass human empathy?
The narrative answer is a hard no. When Tom (James Paxton) and Adele (Lilly Krug) attend a corporate retreat designed for team-building, the irony is thick. The team is being whittled down by a drone codenamed DRAGN. They are a scattered collective of survivors whose only strategy is to spread out and hope it does not find them. Although I am not fully sure whether this is a malfunctioning combat bot or one programmed to be ruthless, the narrative development addressing those points is scarce.
The humans are told to race toward a hard-coded safehouse that acts as the only sanctuary from the machine’s logic. Structurally, the film owes more to the slasher traditions of Halloween than to the high-concept philosophy of Asimov. Any meaningful dialogue regarding the ethics of AI design or the Three Laws of Robotics gets sacrificed for pacing. If these themes were addressed, they were lost in the noise of the hunt.
The film is most effective during its POV sequences. These shots capture a predatory, stalker-like attitude that mimics the malevolent watcher archetype, updated for the digital age. As Jacob (Jadran Malkovich) monitors the slaughter through the machine’s optical sensors, the movie briefly touches on the voyeurism of modern combat. Unlike Squid Game, however, there is no reward for survival, leaving the viewer with a sense of nihilism that the story itself does not quite know how to resolve.
While Tom’s backstory with his wife is key to his surviving this retreat, it feels underdeveloped on screen. As a result, it is difficult to feel any genuine pathos for the victims. They are treated as just deserts for a corporate culture that values efficiency over humanity, a concept that works for a slasher movie but feels shallow when trying to tackle the weight of drone warfare.
The marketing promised a fully loaded exploration of techno-paranoia, but the screenplay is riddled with logic errors and tonal inconsistencies. Ultimately, DRAGN fails to check whether its own code has bugs; it leaves the audience, much like the characters, stuck in “system error” mode.
3 Stars out of 5
Dragn Movie Trailer
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