‘Screenlife’ is a narrow but commercially successful genre of cinema in which the movie screen is used to simulate the desktop of someone’s personal computer. Narratives play out via video and sound files, online calls, chat rooms, and websites. The results are often as limited by their format as they are enhanced by them. A few have found commercial success in American cinemas, including several shepherded by director/producer Timur Bekmambetov. Unfriended (2014) was likely the first mainstream use of the format, and has been followed by Searching (2018) and Missing (2023). To date the strongest implementation of the format I’ve seen was Russian filmmaker Anna Zaytseva’s #Blue_Whale (2021) – that was until seeing Yeva Strelnikova’s Stay Online (2023). In a mildly appalling synchronicity, this new film was made in Ukraine; indeed not only is its first Ukrainian feature since Russia invaded, the invasion forms a central and confrontational core to the narrative.

Katya (Liza Zaitseva) is one of many volunteers in Kyiv using a donated laptop to help repel Russian invaders. In her case she works with her brother Vitya (Oleksandr Rudynskyi) in identifying dead Russian soldiers using social media profiles, and sending demoralising messages and video calls to their families. Katya has never met Andriy Fetsenko (Roman Liakh), whose laptop she currently uses, but Andriy’s Spider-Man-obsessed son Sava (Hordii Dziubynski) calls it, she is drawn into a misguided struggle to somehow find Sava’s parents and reunite them.

If you go by Bekambetov, there are strict rules to a screenlife film that involve never showing anything not displayed on a single monitor. Strelnikova – writing with co-star Anton Skrypets – breaks those rules from time to time, showing close-ups and intimate moments of Katya as she struggles to save a child’s life using only an Internet connection and a laptop. It is to the film’s benefit that she does: one of the constant frustrations of screenlife cinema is how easily the artifice of the computer monitor raises an emotional barrier between character and viewer. That is not an issue here. Stay Online is packed with messy emotion, unbearable compromise, and both the best and worst elements of humanity.

There is a gut-wrenching immediacy to the technology on display, where phone locating app can find injured civilians in a war zone, or where mothers can telephone their enlisted children on the front line. By situating the action primarily among civilians, the entire surreal and horrifying reality of a contemporary war is laid bare. When the USA liberated Kuwait some thirty years ago, numerous books were written about 1990s ‘media wars’. Stay Online, despite being a fictional thriller, opens an eye on ‘social media wars’. They are horrifying to see, and to contemplate.

Liza Zaitseva dominates the film with a bold, honest performance that is both complex and regularly difficult to calmly watch. When the film is as its most tense, it is almost unbearable. While one could criticise some of the technical elements, it would be a crass, duplicitous thing to do. This is vital, energised, and brilliantly realised cinema, coming from a country furiously defending itself from aggression. It is a sensational thriller. It deserves an audience.

Stay Online premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2023. For more information, click here.