SXSW '25: LifeHack

I love crime stories: mysteries, gangland sagas, criminal and detective procedurals. They’re catnip to me. Bob Hoskins’ silent contemplation of his probable doom at the end of The Long Good Friday is one of cinema’s all-time great achievements. Given that, director/co-writer Ronan Corrigan’s LifeHack—a screenlife teen coming-of-age/heist picture that made its world premiere at SXSW 2025 both intrigued me and had its work cut out for it. I’m happy to write that LifeHack does that work darn well. I’m incredibly impressed by how well it threads the needle between “Not bad, kid,” with the protagonists’ cunning heists and ultimate care for each other and “Go to hell, kid” with their teenage obnoxiousness and sometimes callous disconnection from the world—that’s tricky to write, direct, and act. LifeHack’s creative team pulls it off.

Still taken from Lifehack, featuring Georgie Farmer as Kyle, Yasmin Finney as Alex, Roman Hyack Green as Sid and James Sholz as Petey - Directed by Ronan Corrigan | Credit: Lifehack

Kyle (Georgie Farmer), Syd (Roman Hayeck Green), Petey (James Scholz), and Alex (Yasmin Finney) have been internet friends for years. Their shared chatroom is a place to game, swap music, tell stories, commiserate over their lives and families, and occasionally engage in what they tell themselves is Robin Hood-style cybercrime. It’s just that they keep the money and are willing to drop law enforcement (if not SWAT) on the scam call centers they counter-scam. The named-after-Stephen-King’s Loser’s Club look out for each other as best they can. But they’re kids; there’s only so much they can do, especially when separated by the Atlantic Ocean. 

Then Kyle, longing for a connection to his absent, crypto-trading father, gets an idea. Billionaire software tycoon Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles) is all in on crypto. His allegedly beloved influencer daughter Lindsey (Jessica Reynolds) posts everything about her life. The Loser’s Club uses that to get their feet in Lindsey’s door and do some social engineering, the first step in a daring, successful plan to steal $100,000 of Heard’s crypto. It’s a hell of a win, and both in LifeHack and the real world, there are plenty of wealthy jackasses who’ve bought into crypto’s easy money flimflam. So the Club keeps at it. They pile heist upon heist, win upon win until the heat comes around the corner and grabs them by their throats. If they want out, they’ll need to hit Heard again. To hit Heard again, they’ll need physical access to his personal computer, which is locked in his office at his headquarters. Kyle and his friends are bright, clever kids who know their way around hacking, but it’s a tall order. And the consequences of failure promise to be horrific.

As a screenlife film, all of LifeHack’s action plays out through screens and cameras—Kyle and his friends’ running video chat, command lines, text chains, and flashy, addictive social media. Narratively, this lets Corrigan and co-writer Hope Kemp expand on their protagonists’ lives outside the confines of the conversations that dominate the film. Alex is a talented guitarist but keeps her songs unlisted on YouTube, which shades both her character and her relationship with Kyle—they’re close enough that she’s shared a video he wouldn’t have been able to find on his own. Kyle, meanwhile, turns to Alex’s songs when he’s feeling low, and even when he and Petey—who’ve known each other the longest—are in a vicious fight, they’re close enough to take their argument to a private call. 

While LifeHack’s various screens confine its action to specific frames and types of images, Corrigan and Kemp use the nature of their chosen medium—including those restrictions—to their advantage. The climactic heist draws significant tension from the limits of what Kyle and Syd can see through Alex’s phone camera. It’s already a tiny screen, and the nature of the job means that Alex has to keep it stuffed in her jacket pocket, never mind the varying quality of her cell signal in Heard’s office building. LifeHack establishes the Loser’s Club as skilled, inventive thieves operating in a digital community where trust and security are muddled at best. Their strike on Heard’s office means bringing all their skills to bear while trying to learn real-life thievery on the fly, which will stretch their skills to the absolute limit. It’s thrilling, creative work.

LifeHack’s heist—and indeed LifeHack as a whole—succeeds thanks to the strength of its craft and its characters. Farmer, Hayeck Green, Scholz, and Finney do fine work individually and as a group. Each builds their character into a believable, compelling teenager. They’re capable of wretched behavior, astonishing decency, and a fair bit in between. All of it reads as genuine. The Loser’s Club are brilliant, foolish kids with a lot of growing up to do, and the events of LifeHack force them to face life outside the sub-symbolic realm of the modern internet, especially the nonsensical world of crypto. Their journeys ring true.

LifeHack could have benefitted from digging further into the immense chicanery of crypto. It’s volatile, made-up nonsense that eats people’s real money with the promise of improbable returns. Treating it like jewels, precious metals, or even cash lends it a stability that it really doesn’t have.  It’s a good heist film, a good coming-of-age film, and a skillful deployment of screenlife as a storytelling technique. In other words, it’s well worth checking out.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!