The word that comes to mind when I consider Isaiah’s Phone’s formalistic and storytelling goals is “versimilitude.” The film opens with a title card describing the film as a compilation of videos accessed from the phone of a high schooler named Isaiah after he committed a violent act in 2022 (I won’t go further into that storyline here, as I think the film is best experienced without knowing the exact violence perpetrated beforehand). While the film is fictional, the footage–of which there is much: Isaiah obsessively documents himself and the world around him–really and truly looks like the fumbling, casual and inexpert recordings of a teenager. (At times, the shaking and swirling can border on fatiguing, but is that not a feature of amateur smartphone footage? How many people had to suffer through the same effects when watching my Snapchat stories during freshman year?) This sensation of authenticity is vastly elevated by felicitous performances. Isaiah is played by Isaiah Brody, a young man whom director Frédéric Da knew from his time teaching. The boy is doe-eyed and gangly, with light acne scars scattered across a cute, nerdy face. Isaiah’s new and only friend, Max, is played by Max Vadset, an actor who plays a silly, slightly-bad-seeded and seemingly under-parented teen with striking realism. 

Isaiah’s Phone skillfully avoids the most common digital age storytelling pitfall: attempting to accurately capture a specific online experience for teenagers. I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a specific modern digital culture be portrayed accurately and without appearing dated within mere months of its release.

Isaiah’s Phone avoids trying to enter into any worlds of online discourse and identity because it isn’t really about the digital world as much as it is the uncanny sensation of constant digital surveillance–self-perpetrated and otherwise–that young digital natives have been born into. Isaiah isn’t “creating content,” at least not for us to see. Instead, Isaiah compulsively documents the world he inhabits and occasionally, under the cover of night and the literal covers of his bed, speaks directly to the camera and about how he’s feeling, seemingly entirely for himself. At one point, Isaiah claims he obsessively records himself and those around him because it makes him feel more “there”. This practice raises far more interesting questions than the usual adolescent film decree that social media is bad (which, it probably really is!). The world can feel lonely. An image of yourself amongst others, even if no one is looking your way, can feel like proof of the existence of your selfhood. But Isaiah’s Phone also posits that this practice isn’t enough, that creating an optical illusion of “there-ness” cannot be a salve for internal loneliness and a lack of sense of self. Most disturbingly, and perhaps most honestly, Isaiah’s Phone doesn’t really have a suggested answer for the fact that most adolescents lack a full sense of self, are a little weird and are a little lonely. All it offers us this time around is to bear witness to it in its most agonizing form.