Ryan Patch, “Regulation” (2019)
Set in the not-too distant future, in perhaps a post-industrial / hyper-cybernetic age, this short film character study is an intimate and perhaps horrifying snapshot of a controlling police state as manifested in the mundane actions of a low-level functionary. A social worker, Mia (Sunita Mani) drives out into the country with the task of ensuring that all children in the district have received their scheduled medication, dispensed through a skin patch, that controls their emotions and moods. She stops at a farm where she knows (through information on her iPad) that a child, Kayleigh (Audrey Bennett), lives there; moreover, the girl is behind in her medical schedule and does not have this patch. The girl’s mother (Tessa Drake) tells Mia that Kayleigh refuses to wear the patch and she herself is in no mind to force the child into wearing what they both refer to as “the happy patch”.
Mia seeks out Kayleigh who turns out to be highly precocious and imaginative, drawing the social worker into her game featuring an invisible leopard and fighting a fleet of space pirates. Mia attempts to convince Kayleigh into agreeing to accept the happy patch but the child is not persuaded even when Mia tells her about her own younger brother who committed suicide from depression. Finally fobbed off by the girl, Mia has to decide what to do next.
Good cinematography featuring close-ups of plants and caterpillars, and of the social worker and the girl’s faces as they play the game and then talk afterwards, establishes an intimacy between the two and emphasises the dilemma Mia faces in whether she should leave the girl and allow her through her play activities to regulate her own emotions (and risk punishment) or report the girl and her mother. What Mia decides next will either push back the encroachment of the State on people’s personal lives or allow it, through one child at a time, to dominate people’s physical and mental states completely – at the cost of their individuality. The acting and the rapport between the actors playing Mia and Kayleigh are well done, and one can see the strain of the decision Mia has to make at the end of the film.
Many viewers may see in this film an argument against compulsory vaccination and other forms of State compulsion upon families. “Regulation” is also very much a film about how even individual bottom-dwelling inhabitants of a large and oppressive system can either advance it or resist it (perhaps at the cost of their own lives) through seemingly insignificant decisions and actions they may take.