Arkangel

Arkangel is a film that focuses on the themes of privacy and security and how one affects the other. These two themes are shown to us through the story of a mother who wants to make sure she can keep her daughter safe after she loses her for a short amount of time.  

The scene where the daughter does go missing is very impactful and the emotion of the mother seems raw and real meaning the audience will feel the emotions the woman feels and we all feel relief when she is found alive and okay.

This scare leads to the mum trying an experimental test on her daughter by having her implanted with a tiny chip in her head which now allows her to see what her daughter sees as well as know her location and be able to control whether her daughter can see anything graphic from her own blood to an angry dog. As an audience we can feel quite understanding with the mother’s choice as she just had a really big scare that could have ended up with her daughter being missing or worse. 

As the story goes on we see how when the daughter grows up how not being able to see graphic or violent content has affected her upbringing compared to other kids to the point were she stabs her finger to repeatedly to see what blood looks like. After this the mother decides to put the tablet that allows her to track her daughter away hidden and disables all the blocked graphic things she couldn’t see before. And an audience we feel the mother has learnt a lesson from this and has now allowed her daughter to grow up naturally and she grows up with a regular life with no blocked content. 

In the end the mother can’t resist to see where her daughter is when she lied about what she was doing and catches her having sex and doing drugs and begins to drug her with the after pill and removing her boyfriend from her life by threatening him. The daughter then finds out about the mum still watching her and breaks the tablet by smashing it into the mum’s face and running away leaving us with the same shot of when the daughter first disappeared. 

As an audience we think of ourselves in this situation some of us may not be Mothers or Fathers but we are all someone’s Son or Daughter and we can understand the emotions and pain if we were to go missing or if we were to lose a child and not know whether they are safe or not so we begin to think whether we would make the same choices as the mum or how we think our life has shaped us because of the graphic and ugliness of the world we have seen and if it were to be blocked how our lives may have changed us.