Director Ronan Corrigan Talks Making Screenlife Film ‘LifeHack’ with “Authenticity” (Exclusive Interview)

Writer-director Ronan Corrigan has made his directorial debut with the screenlife heist thriller LifeHack. Co-written by Hope Elliott Kemp, the film was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who is also behind the screenlife horror films Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) and Unfollowed (2018).

LifeHack follows a group of teenage friends who regularly meet online through video calls and become entangled in a scheme to steal millions from a tech billionaire’s crypto wallet. Things get increasingly complicated when the heist doesn’t go as planned, leading to a few twists and turns.

Before the film’s screening at the 2025 Overlook Film Festival, we talked with Corrigan about maintaining realism and applying limitations regarding technology and hacking. He told us, “The whole film was built off limitations,” and continued, “We base our characters off true stories of these kids getting into crypto scams, getting into SIM swapping, getting into all kinds of nasty stuff on the dark web.”

The filmmaker reflected on his personal experiences in the PC gaming scene, saying, “I was looking at the extreme cases in that kind of culture. So there’s massive references to work off. When we ran the script through a lot of people that are hackers—we had the black hats, white hats, and grey hats all kind of involved and giving us advice to keeping it as accurate as possible. That was a big thing that we wanted. Our rule was always we didn’t want any magic buttons. We didn’t want a button that said hack and the black and green script. Sometimes, we sped up things, but we always wanted it to have an air of authenticity. I think that screenlife only really works when there’s that authenticity.”

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When it comes to making a screenlife movie, Corrigan says, “I was a big fan of the genre before I made this film, like Unfriended, The Host, and Spree is a really cool one. Searching obviously is class. So, we watched them, and we wanted to respect the genre. Before screenlife, you had found footage and it’s a really cool space for indie filmmakers to make genre films and tell stories that you may not have been able to tell otherwise.”

Since its premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, the film has received a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating. When asked about the experience of such a positive festival run, Corrigan replied, “It’s been great. You can’t ask for a better start.”

LifeHack is still seeking distribution.

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Fuente: https://www.horrorgeeklife.com/2025/04/12/ronan-corrigan-lifehack-exclusive-interview/