Missing person thriller, with a mysterious phone app/game

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Registered User
Hi, hoping this community can help me name a film!

Here's all the elements of the plot I know...

Year of release - anywhere between 2010-2019.

Actors - Can’t name any. Main protagonist is a man, either a private investigator or police officer.

Title / poster visual - potentially some kind of symbol, or a name you might associate with a tech company. Hazy on this.

Setting - Definitely set in the USA, maybe San Francisco but not sure on that

Plot - Protagonist is investigating the mysterious disappearance of a female. During his investigation, he becomes aware of a mysterious phone app / site (creator of which appears to be an anonymous corporation). This app pays you cash for solving puzzles / games. It becomes clear the person he is looking for, has been introduced to this phone app, and was playing it shortly before her disappearance. The app opening screen has, I believe, a recognisable symbol / logo on it.

To solve the investigation, he proceeds to try his hand at the game himself. The challenges are initially fairly easily, with a bit of ARG element, some things he needs to look at through his phone camera etc. He is confused as to how the developer behind the app can afford to effectively give people cash for free. People are earning fairly large amounts of money through it at higher levels. One train of thought is that the app is an innovative job application for a computer programmer role / coder or something. Eventually, the app leads him to a house.

The house is derelict, looks a bit like a rundown San Francisco 'painted lady' victorian houses' (cannot provide link as this is my first post). On entry, he finds the place packed with young people, just sitting on the floor, all glued to this game. They are all stuck at a certain point, because the difficulty of the app has stepped up by this point. Here, the main protagonist meets a girl (not the missing one), who is very experienced in the app, has been playing it for a while. This girl may have recognised a picture of the missing girl (not sure). The protagonist comes to conclusion that the missing person became obsessed with the app, and has progressed further than anybody else.

The pair effectively team up to solve the app together, and this is where my memory gets hazy, and the film takes a fantasy / sci fi turn.

From what I remember, the house they’re in is derelict when you enter from the main door, but there’s a way to get inside and ‘trigger’ the house to look completely different, when you enter via another means. On entering the house using this special method (presumably figured out from the app), the focus shifts from their phones to the building itself. They reach a hall with a double sided staircase looping either edge of an oval room. Climbing the stairs one side ‘loops you’ back to come down the stairs on the other, like a little crack in space time, basically you get stuck in a cycle and can't progress.

Eventually, they realise the floor tiles in the hall (which have symbols on them) need to be solved in order, kind of like an escape room puzzle. From here, they get it in their heads that they need to reach the attic, with further rooms presenting strange problems that seem to defy the laws of science.

At the climax of the film, the main protagonist falls out a top floor window, into big tree, and somehow gets sucked into the roots in a strange, trippy way.

It’s around here that I think he locates the missing person, I’m not sure exactly how this occurs, nor how the movie ends.

Any help appreciated! Hopefully I've given you a good chunk of information to go on :)



A system of cells interlinked
This is from a Netflix show that has sadly been canceled. The show was called The OA, and the scenes you describe are from the second season.



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Registered User
Thank you so much - this is exactly right!