Andrew Cooper (Eugene Simon) is an everyday guy who decides to try one of those DNA programs to trace his ancestry. This leads to a meeting with a strange doctor, and before he knows it, Andrew is being pursued by a shadowy organization. He eventually ends up in a Xavier Mansion-esque place in the English countryside, where he finds out from the also very mysterious Nadia (Emily Wyatt) that he has special abilities of some kind. He has an extrasensory perception that this institute will attempt to identify and strengthen. Andrew’s “training” consists of having his reality manipulated and him having to figure it out and fight back against it. He is accompanied by other people who have these sensory abilities, namely Rebecca (Marybeth Havens) and Shaan (Anil Desai). Any time Andrew offers any resistance or pushback on the situation he finds himself, his mother, who has apparently been taken hostage, is threatened. 

Sensation is very much a story that clearly takes its cues from Christopher Nolan and Black Mirror episodes. It struggles where those others succeed, however, in telling a clear dystopian story about the individual being manipulated by the institution. Sensation has a lot of talk about altered realities, unique people and special powers. Where it struggles is placing these elements into a cohesive story with strong characters. We don’t know much about Andrew, other than he seems to be an everyday guy, and that his mother is in a sanitarium. The relationship with his mother is apparently strong, but we never get any scenes with them to help reinforce this. Instead, we get a couple of phone calls and a brief voice-over where Andrew talks about his past. Andrew sharing screen time with his mother would have gone a long way in developing him as a sympathetic character. Missing that opportunity means missing out on fleshing out Andrew, and making him easier to get behind. 

Unfortunately, this lack of character development extends to the others in the movie. We only learn very small pieces about them, but nothing that would make them likable or more relatable. Instead, they seem to exist only to serve as sounding boards for Andrew to talk to, and eventually, to serve as pawns for a larger narrative purpose. Rebecca is never given a backstory or anything to profess; likewise for Shaan. They interact with Andrew, face some of the same struggles he does while going through the training, and that’s about it. In this case, the characters seem to only exist because of the narrative, rather than vice versa. 

The story and the plot points are confusing. The narrative never makes fully clear what the goal is of this training, or if there is a common enemy that they will be fighting against. Instead, what we get is Andrew and his fellow “gifted” friends being manipulated and used as puppets. Their conclusion seems inevitable even through the confusion of the main story. 

While Sensation has aspirations to be Nolan or Black Mirror, it doesn’t have the solid narrative foundation that those storytellers do. We are given a world where the rules may not always be clear or understandable, which is where Nolan is always able to succeed, even if it’s a bit confusing at first. Nolan is also able to populate his stores with fleshed-out, fully emotive characters. Lacking that in this movie makes it difficult to care, which really topples the entire story. 

3 out of 10