Connor Storrie in April X

 April X, a vaguely dystopian, vaguely cyberpunk sci-fi thriller is the kind of first-time film no one really remembers…unless someone involved happens to hit the Hollywood lottery. In this case, it’s star Connor Storrie, who filmed April X months before landing the role of Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry, the role that would change his life. April X, then, gets shepherded in on Heated Rivalry’s coattails, in the age-old tradition of distributors scraping together whatever pre-fame bottom-shelf dwelling projects are hanging around to be shoved into theaters in hopes of making a quick buck on the back of a newly minted star.

But April X is more than a Connor Storrie curiosity, and while it is thoroughly B-grade filmmaking, there is some real talent involved. Storrie proves that Heated Rivalry isn’t a fluke and he really does have the goods. Even stranded by a mediocre script with some truly stilted dialogue, he turns in a magnetically brooding performance. He stars as Bax, one half of a pair of Adult Twins who sinks into a futuristic underworld while searching for his missing, April. In fact, here Storrie shows some signs of being a screen tyrant, the kind of actor who can dominate a frame no matter what he is doing. His performance is largely unsmiling and taciturn and very still, but he is never not holding the screen and demanding attention. He makes small gestures and expressions into soliloquies that, frankly, do not exist on the page.

He is matched well by Lilly Krug, who gets to be the fun, expressive twin, April. She’s just as interesting to watch as Storrie, and while their on-screen vibe is very “Folgers Christmas commercial” coded, that is at least somewhat intentional, as April is not above using her brother to escape unwanted male attention. Gross! But it also kind of feels like Bax and April being twins might not have been the original plan, because the sibling vibe is weird, to say the least. The performances from Storrie and Krug are truly better than this script deserves.

So, let’s talk about the script. April X is directed by Michel K. Parandi, making his feature directorial debut, and Parandi also co-wrote the script with Jack Coulton, also making his feature screenwriting debut. The script is the weakest link in April X. Parandi injects some style into the film’s low-budget, near future-ish aesthetic, enough that April X looks better than it probably deserves, because woof, the script is a dog. There is no amount of good performances or visual flair that makes up for half-baked world building and a rote, copy-paste tale burdened by terrible dialogue.

Basically, Bax and April are scraping by in a halfway plausible future that seems like maybe corporations and nations have fully enmeshed, or maybe not, April X doesn’t go heavy on the details. It’s not full-blown Blade Runner advertising in your face everywhere, but news bulletins point toward private enterprise utilizing non-human technologies to finally push human labor out of the workforce, and the world within the film makes a big deal of “human drivers”, suggesting people prefer that to robo-drivers, though it’s never explicitly stated.

If you’re not going to fully commit to your world building, it’s not the worst idea to skim over the details, especially since April X is, at heart, a crime drama about a nobody getting in over his head within the underworld. When Bax ends up indebted to a criminal boss, April disappears, and for years, Bax is unable to find a trace of his sister. That is, until clones of April start popping up around town. (A positive note: April X filmed in Romania, and Parandi and his production crew make the most of the former Eastern Bloc country’s unique mix of Soviet and post-Soviet architecture to create the film’s futuristic look. It’s doing the most with what’s already available.) From there, the back half of April X turns into a rescue mission as Bax tries to save whatever is left of April after the cloning process.

There’s a whole bit about recording dreams, which are just memories, on discs, and how April is especially good at this, and this makes her ideal for cloning because her dreams make the clones trainable, which again, is skimmed past pretty quickly. Connor Storrie is saddled with a lot of voiceover to explain the mechanics of the world within the film, because the context clues aren’t really there and the actual writing only scrapes the surface of these ideas. The concept of clones being customizable because they don’t have memories which means they don’t have personalities is intriguing, but April X doesn’t do much with it except turn April’s memory-drives into a Macguffin for Bax to chase.

With more effort in the writing, April X might have made for a more interesting sci-fi vision of a plausible future, in which rampant capitalism renders something as intimate and personal as our memories as currency, but as is, the script is barely passable, and it drags the whole film down. Connor Storrie, Lilly Krug, and Michel Parandi do some good work, but there is no getting around the albatross of the script. April X will mostly be rendered as a footnote on Connor Storrie’s career, but Lilly Krug and Michel Parandi also make a case for remembering their names. April X is forgettable, but the people involved are not.

April X is now playing in select theaters.