After witnessing his girlfriend’s murder, a man risks everything — including reality itself — to discover that nothing is as it seems. A film by Adam Stern, starring Cara Gee, Peter Mooney, Aaron Abrams, Amanda Tapping, Jade Ma, Adam Hurtig, and David Hewlett.

Joe (Peter Mooney) first meets Ash (Cara Gee) while working at his bookstore. They are instantly drawn to each other, and when Ash invites him for coffee, Joe eagerly accepts. Their connection quickly blossoms into a romantic relationship.

Two months later, Joe wakes up in his apartment where his digital assistant MEL (voiced by Amanda Tapping) reminds him that Ash’s assistant has sent an invitation for him to meet Ash at 9:30 a.m. at Old World Roasters. Joe confirms the meeting and asks MEL to send a note to Maxine, telling her that he will be running late.

At the café, Ash appears unusually nervous as she tells Joe that she loves him and wants to reveal the truth about herself and him. She tries to explain that she’s not from the world he lives in, but instead speaks cryptically, saying only that she’s not from here. Before Ash can elaborate, she is interrupted by a mysterious man who pulls out a gun and shoots her in the head. Shocked and furious, Joe races after the man, who is just about to turn a corner. However, Joe is startled to find that it leads to a dead-end alley, and the man has already vanished without a trace.

Since Ash’s death, Joe sinks into depression and grief, locking himself in his apartment. After Oliver (David Hewlett), the newsstand owner near his building, stops by to check on him for the third time, Joe finally allows him to come up. However, Oliver’s visit does little to alleviate Joe’s distress.

That evening, Joe goes out to buy a pistol and a box of bullets, having decided to commit suicide in the hope of reuniting with Ash in the afterlife. However, he becomes puzzled when the gun fails to fire as he points it at his head and pulls the trigger. After several attempts with no result, Joe suspects the pistol is faulty and points it at the sofa, pulling the trigger again. To his shock, the gun fires instantly.

Realizing that the pistol won’t work on him, Joe fires it at the window, shattering the glass. As he approaches the broken window to jump out, he suddenly hears Ash’s voice calling his name. In his moment of distraction, Joe loses his balance and falls out of the window, only to find himself suspended in midair. Suddenly, he wakes up in his bed as if he has just had a nightmare.

As Joe wakes up, his digital assistant MEL announces a video message from Ash and asks if he’d like to play it. Joe remains silent. Getting out of bed, he spots the pistol and box of bullets still on the dining table. He freezes when he notices something odd – the bullet hole that was in the sofa has vanished without a trace. Unsettled, Joe decides to head out to Oliver’s newsstand. On his way there, he witnesses a passing woman’s face distort into digital fragments. His phone buzzes with two new messages from Ash, but he’s too terrified to open them.

Joe holds out his phone to Oliver, its screen flashing with incoming messages, desperate to confirm he’s not the only one seeing them. Oliver confirms that he also can see the message notifications, and suggests they might be pre-written messages from Ash, scheduled to send if anything happened to her. Though Oliver urges Joe to return home, get some rest, and read the messages for closure, Joe is too shaken by the unexplained incident at his apartment. He insists on checking the messages right there at the newsstand.

Joe opens the message, revealing a video clip of Ash telling him that if he’s watching this, something terrible has happened to her and she may not be able to see him again. She tells him she needs his help, explaining that there’s a special order she arranged beforehand waiting for him at his bookstore. Ash asks Joe to get the package and bring it back to his apartment.

Joe hurries to his bookstore and retrieves the delivery from Maxine (Sydney Sabiston). The package appears to be a small red book titled “ON BEING HUMAN.” As he leaves the bookstore and opens the book, a strange sensation like an electric shock passes through his body.

In a control room somewhere, a group of mysterious people monitors Joe’s every move. Bellamy (Jade Ma) dispatches two agents, Walker (Kristian Jordan) and Reid (BJ Verot), to kill Joe and recover the package.

In his apartment, Joe manages to overpower both agents with super strength and abilities he never knew he possessed. Suddenly, Ash appears on his TV screen, communicating with him directly. She reveals that she exists in the real world and has discovered a way to hack into the Digital Universe — a simulation created by Sentec’s brilliant software engineer Anthony Hunter and the enigmatic coder Oliver Cox. Joe becomes devastated as he realizes that he is merely a virtual being in a simulated world.

Written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Adam Stern, LEVELS is an ambitious sci-fi thriller. While the premise is intriguing, the themes of AI becoming self-aware and living in a simulated world have been explored countless times, notably in THE MATRIX and FREE GUY.

Typically, these narratives operate on two levels: the real world and the simulation. However, LEVELS expands this concept to infinite levels, leaving viewers uncertain about which one is the true reality.

Peter Mooney and Cara Gee deliver believable performances, and I particularly enjoyed David Hewlett’s portrayal of Oliver.

However, LEVELS ultimately falls short of its aspirations due to a limited budget that makes the CGI look unrealistic in several scenes, as well as a screenplay filled with unnecessarily long explanatory dialogue — even the villain extensively explains his plan, which disrupts the narrative flow.

LEVELS received a limited theatrical release in Canada and the United States on 1 November 2024. The film was simultaneously made available on VOD on the same day.