FILM REVIEW | World Full of Nothing, by Jesse Pomeroy

Not since Armenian-Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s Adoration has an indie flicker picture so gravely tackled the subject of the web’s pernicious influence on the naive minds of impressionable young internauts.

I introduce Jesse Pomeroy’s World Full of Nothing/WFON, a neat feature-length psychological-drama that unabashedly burrows itself – ferret-like — into your grey mushy zone and somehow gets you chatting up the topic of ‘net pervasiveness and web wackiness during your next double-fisted guzzle session alongside an oak bar.

First, feast your gelatinous ones on this highly unsettling trailer (viewer discretion advised):

So what do we got here? A rash of copycat teen suicides that’s been tying up FBI Agent Krissie Templeman (Jo Bozier) in stitches as Templeman trawls the net’s vastness to pinpoint the very next one. She goes native on us the deeper she plunges into the dark blue abyss of teens who wish nothing more than to prematurely put an end their unlived lives.

Next up are the grizzled internet pervs who stalk fiber optic lines in search of e-fed young starlets to vacuum into their nefarious plots of demented gloom. You know, (mostly) men dressed in seersucker raincoats and galoshes sporting shabby fingernails and ten-day growth salt and pepper beards who alighted the “maturity” train about a thousand stations ago.

Then we got poor Rachael (Bella Nelson), who’s almost daring us to permit her to pull the gun’s trigger, guzzle a bottle of snake oil, down a vial of potassium permanganate, or jump off the nearest high Golden Arches. She emits video bursts of her capricious insolence onto ultra-popular video sharing sites, hoping that some attention-starved zero with a predilection for hairless young boy parts jacks her view numbers into the stratosphere.

Rachael is a real looker…in another universe with another upbringing and perhaps with a vigorous brain scrub, we can almost imagine her nailing summa cum laude and running one of our post-financial meltdown revamped mega-corporations with the trophy husband in tow. Instead, she wastes her searingly-hot yummy good looks and pseudo-intellectualism and cheesy needfulness on some anonymous geezer’s flaccid un-boner. It’s a damn cryin’ shame, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, Agent Templeman (Bozier) is crashing into all sorts of race course obstacles.

There’s something she bizarrely enjoys about gallivanting around town clad in too-tight cheerleader’s garb or in obscenely-short college co-ed minis that seems to float her boat. While these various penchants and disguises are carefully crafted for “going into character” and a boon for juicing the Bureau’s crime-fighting stats, the cumulative effect of Templeman dashing around the city behaving like a girl fifteen years her junior is beginning to take a cognitive toll.

Her superior and friend, Lieutenant Mooney (Markus Innocenti, producer/DP on WFON as well) calls her on the nonsense and – despite a couple attempts at professional intervention, aided by the intentionally-stupefying effects of a good bottle of Beaujolais Dutch courage – dispatches her to an FBI head shrinker (played very convincingly by the director’s dad) with a doctor’s note on FBI letterhead just to make sure that the addled Templeman hasn’t lost her balls, nor her nerve, during her meandering about in the urban wilderness in pom-poms and pigtails.

All this horse trading, however, does zilch to stanch Templeman’s insatiable (and increasingly maddening) curiosity to apply the polished jackboots to the testes sac of the showerless cretin who’s been lasciviously responding to Rachael’s (Nelson’s) desperate pleas for online help, manipulating the aimless girl like a limp Venetian marionette on a cord.

Nothing – and I mean nothing — seems to help our Krissie; neither the regular visits to her FBI-appointed psychiatrist, nor the down time Mooney’s ordered her to take which is effective pronto. Flying in the face of her orders and against her better judgment, Templeman embeds herself ever-deeper into Rachael’s directionless life, burrowing into the facts of the case all the while as Templeman whittles away sleepless nights in pursuit of the predator stalking the despairing teen.

Encircling the film like a gossamer sheen is the omnipresent discussion about the malicious effect the ‘net is having on our 21st-century youth.

Mock boisterous TV talk shows are the fertile arena for spirited debate about the demerits of the World Wide Web with rampant allusions casted by these invited panels of “experts” (among others, played this time, by a near-veteran turn by Pomeroy’s mom – well done!) that the global interwebs be dismantled. These various blowhards attempt to convince the viewers that stuffing the inter-genie back in the Coke bottle will save humanity; while other pontificators, like the fire-and-brimstone breathing preacher (Greg Travis), entreat us to prostrate ourselves to “the Son of God suspended atop a wooden trapeze” as the lone salve for the human race on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Refereeing this roiling contentious mass of utter disharmony is the famous host Rupert Michaels (James Cameron-vet Richard Gunn), who – aghast – mediates the discussion with a modicum of respect, though it’s painfully clear he totally disagrees with practically everything being mentioned during this broadcast.

Is there an exit from this morass? Can there even be said to be a win? World Full of Nothing posits that the mother lode of the damage has already been done, and all that’s left for us to do is suppress – to the best of our futile abilities – any further havoc which a truly open, unfettered internet is having on our celeb-crazed, pop-drunk, overly-“Westernized” terra firma.

A renegade FBI agent who can’t prevent the rotten spread of filth across the global internet.

A wandering pretty teen who is inexorably being hooked into a sinister online ploy by mendacious human monstrosities.

A deeply-concerned friend and lead investigator who realizes he and his team are fighting a truly losing battle.

An embattled TV talk show host who can’t contain his shock and dismay at the calls for a cycling back of world progress.

A callous reporter who understands that “what bleeds, leads,” and who thinks teen suicide is too tame for her blood.

Tens – hundreds — of copycat suicides in response to an online call from a girl named Taylor who blew her brains out with a pistol.

Jesse Pomeroy skillfully posits the all-consuming question throughout WFON: does what we’re doing on a daily basis really amount to a world of nothing?

I’m still undecided…