'Creative Control' is a cautionary tale about getting too personal with tech - CNET

"If you are practiced in the subtle art of psychological manipulation," Dickinson said after a screening in San Francisco last month, "you could get all kinds of people feeling like their animal needs are being met by buying a product, for example.

"I don't think technology is responsible for that; technology is just a tool."

Are we to blame for our own communication breakdowns? Is technology driving a wedge between our personal connections? Onscreen for David, it's certainly not helping.

Safely behind his Augmenta glasses, David is more brazen than his normal self and more removed from the happenings around him. His girlfriend (played by Nora Zehetner of "Maron") pleads with him to give up his increasingly stressful job. As he retreats into his augmented reality, he loses touch with what he is and is not experiencing -- and who with.

The shortfall of his reality is so confusing to David that even his fantasy starts to crumble. You're not sure he can accept the reality he's inadvertently built for himself.

In between lines and phrases such as, "You're a genius!" "No, I'm just younger than you," and having "A boner for the new tech," the film nails exactly what's so cyclical about the tech-fueled lifestyles so many of us have chosen for ourselves.

"We're at an accelerated point where technology...seems to be going down the hill and we're no longer in control of it," Watts said after the screening. "We've let go of it."

"Creative Control" is all about coming to terms with the fact that even without robots, tech runs our lives; we do not run technology.

Filmed in black and white, the movie is visually stunning. In the midst of well-choreographed one-shots and intimate close-ups, the lack of color and ubiquitous clear devices add to the dystopic feeling of the tech-centric film.

All of the tech used onscreen in the film is transparent, and the only pops of color are there to differentiate the augmented world from the real. At first, they draw you. After the first hour, you start to get lost in the color, much like we get lost in our devices every day, and the line between real and not blurs for the viewer nearly as much as for David.