From Writer/Director Jon Cohen comes Backlash, the story of gamers who must battle to the DEATH! Yes real death! Out now on Digital |

When a group of online gamers are pitted against each other in a real world death-match based on their computer game after their cyber bullying causes a suicide of a classmate. Things are about to get deadly! Welcome to Backlash, from director Jon Cohen

Starring Elke Hinrichsen, Alyson Rudlin,Lexie Rose , Jesper Stenberg

Marnie, and her friends love violent online games, especially a game which uses real world locations for settings. When a loner from their school who likes Marnie joins the game, they humiliate him, posting their bloody slaughter on the internet, which gains 10s of 1000s of views. When he doesn’t turn up to school next day, they don’t care. That night they are all kidnapped, including Marnie’s blind younger sister JJ, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. They wake trapped in the actual location of the level they played the night before. Around their necks are shock collars, soon they discover this is very real. They have been split into two teams of 3, Protectors and Attackers. The protectors must rescue the ‘diplomat’, an innocent, which is where JJ comes into the game. The attackers must stop them. The only way to survive the game, which they believe is being run by the loner they humiliated, is to kill the other team, then the exit will open.

Backlash opens with a ton of potential: a group of young adult gamers find themselves held ‘hostage’ by a masked figure and are then forced into a live-action version of their ‘Call of Duty’ style game where survival becomes the ultimate achievement. score. This premise of Backlash taps into timely themes whether its online behaviour, video gaming culture, and the situations that have real-life consequences and for much of the films runtime, the film does wonderfully with those points .

On the positive side: the acting performances are good, the films setting works to give a feeling of isolation and tension. The concept of the story as Id mentioned is a really good one (think Tron, or Cube, or to a certain extent the Saw franchise) and you are on the right path.

However, and this is where my “average” rating kicks in Backlash does suffer because of (im sure) its limited resources or perhaps budget. I generally don’t care how much a film costs, that’s for the filmmakers and the people who stand to make money from a movie to concern themselves with. I only care whether the film has entertained me, or educated me (or both) and for the most Backlash did certainly entertain me but I cant help wonder what the film would have looked like it the filmmakers had been able to make the ‘video game world’ environments look more like a video game world, rather than just having those scenes shot in the real world with nothing video gamey about them. I don’t mean that the film needed to look like Minecraft or Tron, but when the characters in the film are running around in a public park (but are in the video game) it would have been great not to think that these scenes were shot in a public park. But I will remind myself that this is likely to do with resources and budget.

With upgrades, Backlash might have crossed from a solid indie thriller into a memorable genre film.

Backlash is a worthwhile watch for fans of the premise and it really is a great premise, and for those who appreciate indie genre efforts with something to say. Yes its held back a bit by the very constraints I mentioned that many indie films face. But its still a fun watch. Backlash landed on my ‘radar’ because of Jon Cohen who’s 2021 rom-com Introducing Jodea was one of my favourite films of that year so I was excited to see Jon’s latest film. With Introducing Jodea that film shone because of its story, its performances and its charm. Backlash with its kill or be killed storyline would always lack to be classed as ‘charming’, its not that type of film but its still an entertaining way to spend my afternoon.