“Hey!”—met with no attention—“HEY!”—yelled much louder. (It’s difficult to cut through all the distractions.) “I am from the future…All of this goes horribly wrong. Horribly wrong…Social media has robbed you of your dignity and turned you all into children.” The timeline to our doom is presented in a direct, challenging and breathless manner. At first, we restricted checking emails and social-media feeds to “morning phone time.” But this got longer and longer until “people stopped getting out of bed entirely.” We all became sick so “the medical supply industry boomed.” But “where did all the bookstores go?” (We have “Ink and Quill” on John Street.) So-called Artificial Intelligence is coming but “it can be stopped” and “humanity can be saved.” So says an agitated man in a strange outfit who pops into a diner in contemporary Los Angeles. “I’m looking for recruits,” he says. “Soldiers,” because, unlikely as it may appear to the cinematic audience, “This is where the revolution begins—”
Five minutes earlier the filmmakers ingeniously laid out the status quo by meandering through the images on the phones of the diners—topless men and dancing pets and ludicrous fancy-dress costumes—swiped at the dizzying rate of more than one image per second; the calmness of the atmosphere proving that we consider this—distraction after distraction after distraction—to be normal.
As the camera spins frantically around the man, played by Sam Rockwell, the diners—like us—want to know, What on earth is going on? “You’re not well,” one says. “You look homeless, bro,” says another. The man hardly helps his case with his grandiose replies—“I come from a nightmare apocalypse,” he says. He talks smoothly and rapidly and high-spiritedly, like a public speaker. He has done this many times before, without success—none of these world-saving trips turn out the same way. He is touchy and wizened and contemptuous of twenty-twenties humanity. He can opine in any moment on any matter. Much of what he says is made up of insults worthy of some big comedy club. One character takes his insults and then he insults the next. “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” (Constantin Film), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is as inventive, exhilarating, and just plain crazy as anything to have appeared since the Playhouse opened in 2021.
But “Good Luck…” is far more than a devastating take-down of A.I. Some combination of the forty-seven people in the diner must help the man: a nod to the mathematical logic which propels A.I.—there are millions of possible combinations of diners. He is the moving spirit of his entirely ordinary group; other members include a secondary-school supply teacher, a woman allergic to Wifi who works as a princess-on-hire for little girls’ birthday parties, and a woman whose son was recently murdered at a mass-shooting event at his high school. These characters create an ensemble-piece; the film slices the gang’s thrilling adventure—to find the home of a genius nine-year-old “invent[ing] super-intelligence in sixty minutes”—with a series of substantial flashbacks focusing upon the backstory of each of its selected members in turn.
“Did you lose your child in a school shooting today?” Susan, played by Juno Temple, is asked. “It’s a shame when they’re great and get shot by their peers.” But a tech company has come up with a profitable solution. One of their sales reps (sporting obligatory black polo-shirt and immaculate teeth) makes her an offer. “We can recreate your son as a clone today,” he says. And although “it’s wildly expensive,” “if you get the version with ads” which are “tailored towards products he finds interesting,” the government will pay. He presents a screen menu of character traits for Susan to choose, like possible answers on a television game show. “I’m thirsty,” her cloned son says. “I want apple-berry peach tea. Its only got seventy calories. It’s made from real-fruit flavours.” Two fabulous characters appear at a house party for similar parents. “This is our fourth time going through it,” they say. “We have fun. We made her…way too tall!”
Haley Lu Richardson plays Ingrid—“…the first person in human existence to be allergic to technology…How will she ever find happiness or joy or love?”— who is selected for the mission because the man “has a soft spot for weirdos.” “It’s like you’re allergic to the air!” someone remarks. Her boyfriend, another excellent character, played by Tom Taylor, eventually succumbs to a virtual-reality headset. “I thought we agreed to live without those things,” Ingrid says. When she returns from work that afternoon, he is stuffing scoopfuls of sugary breakfast cereal into his mouth. “I cannot describe to you how good I feel right now,” he says. “Why can’t we already be our best selves?” Later, entering a “life inside,” he says, “I wish I’d never gone in there. But I cannot un-know what I know. Someone has made a better world.”
Little details glisten like baubles—a ceiling-high, Christmas-tree-shaped pile of cables, an empty “Prime” box tossed aside, a skip stuffed with single-use plastic bottles, a colossal cat crushing a sports-utility motorcar, thousands of scurrying rats, an army of teen-agers uniformly glued to their phones like infecteds in a zombie movie, a robot vacuum that scurries through a hole like Jerry, the mouse from “Tom and Jerry.” And, as a final gesture, those cables convert into hundreds of snakes.
A bricked-up door in the nine-year-old’s house is a door that has been shut a long time. “The world out there is so painfully slow,” the child says. “I am an inevitability. A human experience as it always should have been.” This is pretty much how the tech industry speaks to us, except that we are the children. “Good Luck…” presents its rock-solid intellectual argument—the danger of A.I. creating itself and the foolishness of reaching for tech solutions to all of our problems—through the lens of comedy. It is strong on dialog, ensemble, ideas and effects (the list of animators, compositors and artists in the credits seems endless). We are not O.K. “You think you can trust reality?” the child asks. “There’s nothing scarier than your reality.”
Adam Poole
21st February 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
