A contact lens that can capture everything its wearer sees sits at the centre of Parallel Minds, a Canadian science-fiction thriller from 2020 directed by Benjamin Ross Hayden. The story unfolds in a near future where recorded vision has become a route to reconstructing human memory.
What is Parallel Minds about?
Red-Eye, a technology company, is close to finishing a device worn on the eye that stores a person's field of view and can play those recordings back as memories. Before the product is ready, the firm's lead researcher is found dead. Detective Thomas Elliot takes up the case, and he is joined by researcher Margo Elson, whose knowledge of the project draws her into the investigation. Their inquiry leads them toward something harder to pin down than an ordinary suspect: an artificial intelligence able to shift form inside digital systems. As the two follow its trail, parts of their own histories resurface and put them at risk, and the question becomes what this intelligence is trying to absorb and why.
About the cast
The ensemble is led by Greg Bryk and Tommie-Amber Pirie, with Neil Napier, Michelle Thrush, Chelsea Anne Green and Stephane Legault in supporting parts. Benjamin Ross Hayden directs.
Context & significance
Parallel Minds belongs to a strand of science fiction concerned with memory, surveillance and the recording of private experience. Stories in this vein ask what happens when a technology designed to preserve the past can also be used to enter or alter it. Here, that idea is framed as a police procedural: a death at a research company opens a case that moves from a conventional investigation toward questions about artificial intelligence and identity. The film combines two genres, sci-fi and thriller, and runs 86 minutes, a compact length for a story built around a single investigation. The lens technology at the heart of the plot is fictional, but it draws on familiar present-day themes such as wearable cameras, data collection by technology firms and the growing role of automated systems in everyday life.
Watching Parallel Minds on Ktime
Parallel Minds is available on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it can be watched in Farsi or in the original English with Persian text on screen. Watching requires signing in with a free K-Time account; this page itself is open to read. K-Time is a Persian-focused streaming service for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface throughout.