Director: Kris Smith
Set in a near-future Britain where antibiotics no longer work, Buying Time imagines survival as something you can literally trade for, chip by chip, life by life.
What is Buying Time about?
By 2028, a corporation called Lifeline controls the only defense against a world where infections kill freely: a health chip distributed through the national health service. A stronger upgrade exists, but it comes at a brutal cost — someone else's processing power, meaning someone else's life, has to be given up to power it. When Daniel Avery loses his wife and daughter to circumstances tied to this system, disturbing flashbacks push him to start asking questions Lifeline would rather he didn't. His search for answers pulls him toward a resistance movement working to expose how far the company and its government backer will go to protect a scheme built on scarcity and greed.
Cast & crew
The cast is led by Andy Blithe as the grieving investigator at the center of the conspiracy, with Ryan Enever and Mark Wells filling out the resistance and corporate sides of the story. Director Kris Smith builds the low-budget science fiction thriller around intimate, dialogue-driven scenes rather than large-scale effects, keeping the focus on Avery's personal loss.
Context & significance
Buying Time, a 2024 British production, belongs to a lineage of speculative thrillers that use a single piece of near-future technology — here, a life-extending health chip — to dramatize inequality and corporate overreach. Its premise of paying for survival with someone else's life gives the science fiction premise a sharper, more personal edge than typical dystopian world-building, grounding the conspiracy in one family's grief.
Where & how to watch
Buying Time is available to stream on K-Time once you log into a free account; the page itself is open to read without signing in. K-Time's Farsi-language interface and Persian-focused catalog make it straightforward for diaspora viewers to find genre titles like this alongside Persian-language programming.