Please Hold (2020)

The young “Mateo” (Erick Lopez) is heading to work one morning when he is apprehended by an automated policeman, forced to put on hand-cuffs and incarcerated - all without seeing or speaking to an human being. In his cell, the big screen advises him to plead guilty or face 45 years in jail, but he still hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s supposed to have done. With no money, he has to take a prison job to try to earn enough to place a call to his folks to try and get their help to raise enough cash for a perfunctory chat - but that just proves to be with an uninterested attorney who just wants his fee. Is there any chance he is ever going to even get to court let alone attain his freedom, and even if he does - what could possibly await him on the outside? At a time when there is talk of removing juries from some trials in the UK, this offers quite an unnervingly plausible look at just how that process of gradual erosion might actually turn out as automation becomes easier, cheaper, and cleaner - especially when visited upon those with limited resources to combat this quite scary pay-as-you-go culture. Lopez delivers quite well as the hapless fellow increasingly frustrated at every turn, and the relentlessly presented, jargon-laced, text messaging serves to effectively, and sometimes quite comically, dehumanise the processes of not just justice, but of humanity itself. Worth twenty minutes, and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t resonate on some level with all of our day-to-day lives just a little.