The 2015 Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival kicks off Thursday night with Deep Web, a chilling, persuasive new documentary feature from former St. Louisan Alex Winter. Narrated by Keanu Reeves, the film crawls through those portions of the non-indexed Web dubbed the darknets, semi-secret networks accessible with specialized software. Deep Web’s focus is the free, anonymized darknet enabled by the Tor software, and especially a notorious site known as Silk Road. An online marketplace facilitated by the Bitcoin virtual currency, Silk Road was utilized overwhelmingly for the buying and selling of illegal and prescription drugs.
The saga of Silk Road is complex and far-reaching, but Winter handles the material deftly. He’s assisted in no small part by Wired journalist Andy Greenberg, who has reported on the story for years, and serves as an approachable docent for the film’s bleak, unsettling story. Animated sequences succinctly lay out the basics of the underlying technology for lay viewers, permitting Deep Web to devote its efforts to more humane angles. The film delves into the curious anarcho-capitalist subculture of Silk Road, which was purportedly founded and managed by a series of masterminds, all using the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR).
When the law enforcement noose inevitably tightened around Silk Road in 2013, an unlikely 29-year-old named Ross Ulbricht was arrested and identified as the then-current DPR. Deep Web spends its (slightly over-long) second half following Ulbricht’s Kafka-esque journey through the federal justice system. Winter doesn’t linger on the brazen illegality of Silk Road, but instead sows doubt about Ulbricht’s true role in the site, while relating the troubling, stacked-deck character of his prosecution. The film paints a picture of government overreach, wherein the right to anonymity is aggressively under attack. Like last year’s Oscar-winning Citizenfour, Winter’s film is both sobering and convincing.
Deep Web screens Thursday, November 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Landmark Tivoli Theater. Director Winter will be on hand to discuss the film and receive the Charles Guggenheim Cinema St. Louis Award. For tickets or additional information, visit the Cinema St. Louis website.
Full Disclosure: Andrew Wyatt is serving as a juror for the New Filmmakers Forum's (NFF) Emerging Director Award at the Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival.
