Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded

Part of the pleasure of going on holiday is being in a place where one can escape the scrutiny of day to day life and take in the sights and sounds of a new place without feeling self-conscious. Englishwoman Anna (Anna Maguire) is really enjoying her trip to L.A., she says on a phone call to someone back home. One of the few points of annoyance is that it’s hard to get a phone signal, so she wanders outside the house where she’s staying, trying to find a better location before giving up.

Never mind. There are other benefits to being out here. She lights up a joint as she walks along the street. There are interesting cacti in people’s gardens, US flags flying on poles, quaint houses – things she wants to photograph. But as she wanders, she also notices the signs. A request to keep pets off the landscaping seems innocent enough, but there are more, increasingly unreasonable (though all realistic), in accumulation pointedly unwelcoming. And then, when she steps onto somebody’s driveway to get a better picture, that tinny announcement that will be familiar to many: “Hi! You are currently being recorded.”

One might wonder why an Englishwoman needs to travel five and a half thousand miles to worry about being recorded when she could easily do that at home, but there’s something different about experiencing it in what is, at first glance, a relaxed, attractive residential neighbourhood. Furthermore, the recent craze for Ring doorbells in the Golden State means that the same voice is everywhere; stumbling away from one AI observer means falling into the view of another one. Add in the confusion and hint of paranoia caused by the cannabis and Anna is soon in full blown panic mode. But it’s the ending of the film that sounds the most disturbing note. Those ‘private property’ signs are everywhere, but does anybody have any real privacy at all?

It’s unfortunate that this film has emerged at the same time as Grame Arnfield’s Home Invasion; it’s a better piece of work but, being a short, it’s likely to be overlooked in favour of the other. Maguire and co-writer/director Kyle Garrett Greenberg keep it simple and it’s more effective as a result. Screening at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, it’s likely to be interpreted as horror, though it’s close to comedy territory – and yet the phenomenon it addresses has much wider implications. Thanks to cinema, we still picture our science fiction dystopias as perpetually twilit inner city hellscapes with garbage everywhere and screeching sirens. What if they’re here right now but they have classically sculpted porches and balconies, terracotta tiles, white stucco, topiary and little fake marble sculptures of dogs?