Movie Review: LIFEHACK

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 15th, 2026 / 02:58 AM

LIFEHACK movie poster | ©2026 Iconic Events Releasing/Triple Media Film

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Georgie Farmer, Yasmin Finney, James Scholz, Roman Hayek-Green, Jessica Reynolds, Charlie Creed-Miles
Writers: Ronan Corrigan & Hope Elliott Kemp
Director: Ronan Corrigan
Distributor: Iconic Events Releasing/Triple Media Film
Release Date: May 15, 2026

LIFEHACK is a movie that quickly makes you question your own life choices. These won’t be so much about morality, love or employment as they are about, “Does anything I do online make anybody likely to hack me?”

Technically a heist thriller, LIFEHACK belongs to the “screens” subgenre, in which all the action is shown on some type of screen, such as computers, cellphones and security cameras. This fits with the premise as, for many of its characters, getting past layers of encryption is as easy as walking through automated sliding doors.

An onscreen title informs us that fourteen is the average age of kids who perform mischievous and sometimes dangerous data hacks. The quartet of friends at the center of LIFE HACK are slightly older, age seventeen, when most of the story takes place. (There are at least one too many “two years earlier”/”two years later” notifications for this reviewer to be certain if they are nineteen or twenty-one by the end.)

Kyle (Georgie Farmer), Alex (Yasmin Finney), Petey (James Scholz), and Sid (Roman Hayek-Green), although in different countries – Kyle and Sid are in the U.K., Alex and Petey are in the U.S. – hang out together in chats and multiplayer shoot-‘em-ups.

However, the gang excel at giving trolls a taste of their own medicine. Those scammers who attempt to get financial information via false flags have well and truly picked the wrong mark when they target Kyle. Kyle arguably takes things too far when he retaliates by swatting the offenders (that is, sending a SWAT team to their location), which is our first clue that he lacks a sense of proportion.

This is borne out when Kyle, after learning that many tech billionaires made their first million by the time they were nineteen years old, reckons that he’s got two years to achieve this himself.

Problem: Kyle and his pals, while they have an awesome range of tech knowledge and talent between them, haven’t invented anything saleable. So, Kyle hatches a plan to net himself and his buddies well over a million by stealing the bitcoin wallet of tech billionaire Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles). The scheme initially involves catfishing Heard’s teen model daughter Lindsey (Jessica Reynolds) but gets exponentially more complicated and dangerous than anybody expected.

As mentioned above, the meta aspects of LIFEHACK are likely to give many viewers the heebie-jeebies. This aside, director Ronan Corrigan & his co-writer Hope Elliott Kemp succeed in upping the jeopardy and finding new ways of opening up the locations. We’re not stuck in everybody’s bedrooms for the duration and in fact receive a satisfying amount of “get out of there now” sequences.

There are a couple of hiccups here. One is a plot thread that appears ominously huge, only to dwindle considerably by the finale. The other is our main characters. Kyle and Sid are credible as neglected young souls seeking validation and an outlet, and Farmer and Hayek-Green deliver naturalistic performances, as do most of their fellow actors.

Credibility in this instance, though, doesn’t entirely equate to providing new insights. We don’t learn anything we don’t already know (or at least strongly suspect) about young people who alleviate boredom by causing problems for others, in the cyber realm and elsewhere. We generally feel more exasperation with than affection or empathy for the gang, though there’s usually enough going on to hold our attention.

LIFEHACK has a pleasingly twisty plot that is well-executed by its makers. It just remains more intellectually interesting than viscerally engaging. It does serve as a solid warning about online security, which may be the movie’s most important function.

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A "screens" thriller about a cyber heist that takes some turns

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Article: Movie Review: LIFEHACK

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