A reminder to keep putting off that system update.

A typewriter is a quaint choice for a protagonist in a techno-thriller, but that’s what Peripheral offers: a bristling, vintage manual clacking away in the corner like it’s about to start chain-smoking and pitch a Netflix series about the Bauhaus movement. For a film about the future of digital publishing, it’s strangely obsessed with tactile nostalgia – a kind of cyberpunk Call The Midwife in reverse, where rubber tubing and analogue knobs are meant to signify something profoundly unsettling but mostly just look like a discarded 1980s sex toy catalogue.

Peripheral wants, very badly, to be a Cronenberg film. Not a good one, mind – more like one of the ones people pretend to like for credibility. It aches for that sweaty, skin-crawling techno-horror ambience, where wires and meat blur, and identity buckles under pressure from screens and flesh. But what it ends up delivering is more like Videodrome by way of a student union blackout poetry night. The meat never really sticks to the circuitry.

The story congeals around Bobbi Johnson (Hannah Arterton), an author whose first novel ignited political protest and whose follow-up is stalled by some combination of writer’s block, trauma, and one of the worst editorial interfaces this side of Microsoft Word 97. Arterton does her level best with a character who seems caught between metaphor and metaphor – a bleeding thumb here, a forced rewrite there – but the film never trusts her enough to let the psychological horror speak for itself. Instead, it plugs her into an AI editing system that manifests like a sentient Ring doorbell with opinions on sentence structure, and things spiral into hallucinatory control-freak territory.

Time in Peripheral isn’t just a pressure – it’s a distortion field. The countdown is meant to anchor the narrative, but instead it drifts in and out of focus, rarely matching the intensity or duration of the scenes. Days vanish. Physical changes occur too quickly. Mental decay races ahead of the clock. It creates the sense that Bobbi’s perception – and by extension, ours – is being warped by the system that’s supposedly helping her. Her world isn’t accelerating; it’s being rescheduled, rewritten on the fly, like the prose she’s forced to amend.

The imagery flirts with body horror but backs off whenever it might get interesting. A finger splits, a screen flickers, a glitch stutters – it all happens with a kind of polite reserve, like the film’s worried it might offend someone’s algorithm. There are moments that feel like they’re building to something Cronenbergian – something wet, fleshy, uncomfortable – but the payoff is always too hesitant, too low-budget BBC4. The film lacks the perversity, the squirm, the transgressive glee that defines the genre it clearly reveres.

Still, there’s a narcotic undertow pulling at everything. Bobbi’s spiralling isolation and increasing dependency on the system play like a high-tech riff on chemical addiction, and when her sweaty, twitchy ex-boyfriend slinks back into the picture – all erratic energy and sunken-eyed urgency – it’s like a contact high of the life she’s trying to rewrite out of existence. He’s less an antagonist than a human caution label: this is what happens when you try to kick against the system without a backup plan. He brings the stink of old vices back with him, and the film briefly sparks to life with something like tension – the kind that comes not from jump scares but from knowing someone in the room might genuinely be about to piss themselves.

It’s in these moments – strung out, half-delirious, on the verge of something – that Peripheral brushes up against the film it might have been. A techno-thriller about creative violation should feel dangerous, subversive, alive with static. This one mostly hums politely and asks you to proofread its manifesto.

The typewriter becomes a kind of resistance to digital tyranny, but the metaphor gets more laboured the longer it clacks. There’s something faintly tragic about watching a movie that wants to decry technological control end up so stifled by its own limitations – aesthetic, narrative, and conceptual. It’s a cautionary tale that forgot to plug itself in.

Arterton holds the centre with surprising grace, and there are a handful of moments – a corrupted message here, a brief swell of dread there – where you can see the film almost snap into the kind of psychotropic nightmare it clearly wants to be. But Peripheral never quite breaches the surface. It touches the nerve but never digs in.

It’s not Cronenberg – it’s Crohn’s-energic. Uncomfortable, yes. But for all the wrong reasons.