As technology reaches a point of self-sufficiency, it can feel like we as humans are getting in way over our heads. With Peter Webber’s action/horror film DRAGN, this concept (and its titular AI foe) is let loose over a team of unsuspecting forest retreaters as they find their situation is far more dire than the simple company trip they expected. But, with its stilted action and unimaginative AI villain, it has a hard time getting off the ground to make either of its genres shine.
After a cold open that introduces us to the sudden brutality and aggression of the DRAGN (Defensive Reaction and Ground Neutralization), we meet Tom (James Paxton) as he prepares to depart from his family for a work retreat. He meets up with a few other Mantiz employees, Adele (Lilly Krug), Daniel (Carlos Bardem), Sebastian (Franz Drameh), and the company plant, Jacob (Jadran Malkovich).
Following their tempestuous meeting, the team is brought to a remote region of Serbia known as The Zone. From here, their supposed “punishment” for poor work performance becomes more sinister as the horror tropes begin, and as this dangerous AI entity, loose in the woods, begins to hunt them down.
Though DRAGN seemingly wants to challenge our biases with AI and its dangerous capabilities, there’s nothing here that would indicate a true threat to human intelligence. The DRAGN bot can fly, shoot, imitate voices, and protract a little buzz-saw for some up-close destruction, but it never has the feel of something truly technologically advanced. I appreciate its practicality on screen, but its slow movement and less-than-threatening design leave a lot to be desired when it comes to functioning as a scare tactic.
There’s even little sense of suspense when it comes to showing this drone, as we practically see all of its bulky glory within the cold open. So, as this thing buzzes around our survivors, it never lets a true feeling of fear or intimidation sink in.
I also would have gotten more caught up in the stakes of this journey if this team had a bit more cohesion to it. They may be unfamiliar coworkers, but this group never finds a rhythm together. They play the generic horror roles: Tom as the meek hero, Adele as the edgy sex-fiend, Daniel as the older grouch, and Sebastian as the cool jock. But it’s in these overdone prescriptions that really limit each of these characters. None of them gets more to do than their genre-determined role, and their actions never come as a surprise.
Upon meeting a previous DRAGN survivor Zoja (Alice Pagani), there is an attempt through exposition to understand a bit of the drone and its goal. Though it manages to drop inklings of important questions related to the greater threat of rogue militaristic AI tech, the script always narrows the focus to its expected horror angle. While a full expo dump of the DRAGN’s history is certainly not the fix, there’s a middle ground here that both emphasizes the threat of this machine and allows us to get a sense of how AI is becoming a weapon. Unfortunately, Webber doesn’t seem as interested in that.
What helps with the immersion factor is in these practical environments. The dilapidated, abandoned feel to the forests and to these structures helps cement this semi-apocalyptic vibe that fits into all this isolation. This fractured reality leads to an interesting visual combination of natural destruction alongside a form of technological destruction as DRAGN hunts its final victims.
DRAGN wants to evoke something from the golden age of techno-threats like Predator or War Games, but doesn’t find anything significant to latch onto besides the standard genre tropes. As much as it tries to stake its claim within the AI conversation as well as inside the action/horror genre, it misses a lot of the substance that made the experiences of its influences so memorable.
DRAGN is now available on VOD from Cineverse.
The official ScreenAge Newsletter has arrived! Subscribe to receive a semi-regular round-up of all our exclusive content, including reviews, editorials, Top 100 lists, and more! C'mon, we know you want to venture further into the Wasteland with us!