Levels: Imagining The World Is a Simulation. So What?

By Chris Knight

Rating: C+

More than 50 years ago, West German television gave us 1973’s World on a Wire, an early cinematic version of the question: What if we’re living in a simulated reality?

The year 1999, consumed by fin de siècle philosophizing, delivered us The Matrix, Existenz, and The 13th Floor, mind-bending movies that imagined virtual worlds almost unrecognizable from the real thing. (Fun fact: in the final scene of The 13th Floor, the main character wakes up in the year 2024.)

By 2021, Free Guy starring Ryan Reynolds played the whole idea as farce.

So, it’s a little strange in 2024 to be watching Levels, a new film that takes the same notion as all these older films to pretty much the same old places. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s been done before, and done better.

This Canadian production by writer-director Adam Stern stars Peter Mooney as Joe, who runs a bookstore in a near-future that has little use for such anachronisms. One day the mysterious Ash (Cara Gee) walks in and invites him out for coffee.

Watch our interview with the stars and director of Levels

They quickly become an item, but she’s cagey about certain aspects of her life. Then one day, a stranger shows up to one of their dates, shoots her through the head, and promptly vanishes. Joe is inconsolable — until he gets a mysterious message from his former love, one of those “If you’re watching this, I’m dead” missives. What gives?

Well, the trailer tells us, so I’m going to as well. Someone has created the first “DU,” or digital universe, full of artificial intelligences that think and feel and even love, unaware they’re part of a vast computer simulation.

Hunter (Aaron Abrams) is using this simulation to test out hypotheticals and counter-factuals without real-world consequences. (In one amusing aside, he references a world that “elected an autocratic, malignant narcissist to high office,” intimating that the sim didn’t end well.)

Joe and the dead-but-maybe-not Ash must now find a way to defeat Hunter, who seems to have control over an entire universe, although it’s suggested that even he can’t break certain rules that have been baked into the program.

It’s fine as far as it goes, but Levels sometimes seems to be trying for Matrix levels of action without that film’s budget. There’s an almost comical scene, for instance, in which Joe manipulates a touch screen to request weapons, opening a small cupboard and reminding us of Neo’s access to an infinite gun rack in the Wachowskis’ film.

I wanted to like Levels. It’s slick, and well-acted, and it features the likeable and underrated Canadian actor David Hewlett in a pivotal role.

But there’s not enough under the hood, and the screenplay sometimes strains to tell us (rather than show us) the complexities of the reality it’s creating. Maybe if we weren’t already living in a world that Elon Musk has declared is probably a simulation, this film might have made me shudder and shiver. As it was, I merely shrugged.

Levels. Directed by Adam Stern. Starring Cara Gee, Peter Mooney, David Hewlett and Aaron Abrams. In theatres November 1.