Opening with a locked-room mystery for detective Nick Collymore (Fabrizio Santino), Marc Zammit’s Jitters moves swiftly from a police procedural to tech-horror as the victim had been working on an advanced AI-driven video game. The immersive game features an odd-looking clown named Jitters (Daniel Jordan) who terrifies the players to deadly extremes, causing suicide and even being literally scared to death.
Despite the rather lame look of the main antagonist (a very knowing moment has Nick quip that the clowns are a “little played out”), Jitters is more layered than the standard indie horror film. George Willcox’s script is knowing and witty, bringing in the detective’s private life and struggles with his ex-wife, Julia (Lauren Budd), a character who’s not portrayed as an embittered ex for once. There’s some great cinematography by Richard Oaks, and the concept behind the Jitters character is more effective when suggested than when seen.
The relevance of the danger that AI could pose adds another layer of dread as Collymore enters the sinister digital world to face the deadly and manipulative Jitters. The film could have delved deeper into the game and its clown cypher, controlling and twisting its players’ emotions from addiction to the gameplay, to using their emotions, fear, and guilt to cause them to take their lives. There’s a pertinent nod to the AI threat in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and, indeed, its real-world use in early computers) through the vintage song Daisy Bell and some pop culture references; however, the real terror is in the algorithm.
As a thriller focused on the fear of technology and personal trauma, Jitters punches above its modest budget and is entertaining, if not scary in the traditional horror movie sense.
