Richard Crouse

“Another Body,” a true crime investigative documentary that looks at a very twenty-first century criminal act, the deepfaking of pornography. “No woman in the world is safe from this technology.”

Wikipedia defines “deepfake” as a “portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’” and explains they “are synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness convincingly with that of another.” In other words, taking the real-life image of someone from the web and digitally cutting-and-pasting their face on pornographic footage.

“Another Body,” from directors Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, dives into the story of Taylor Klein, a 22-year-old engineering grad who began receiving strange, provocative messages from strangers on her social media. Turns out she’s being doxed by someone who has also deepfaked her face onto an on-line pornographic film.

Humiliated and concerned, she contacts law enforcement, who say they are unable to help her because no laws have been broken in that state. The deepfakes, she says, “[make me] ”feel like I’m not in control in that one area of my life, [and] it’s causing me to feel out of control in other areas of my life.”

When she hears of Julia, an old classmate whose life is being turned upside down by similar deepfaked images, the two become advocates for themselves as they compare stories and come up with a suspect, someone they both knew who would be capable of this most personal fraud. “I don’t really think there is anything that could make up for what has happened,” Klein says.

To reinforce the power of this deepfake technology Compton and Hamlyn, in an effort to maintain Klein’s privacy, do the standard stuff, changed her name and the name of her school. What is different is the way they very realistically deepfaked an actor’s face over her real face. It protects her identity, but if you need any more convincing of the effectiveness of the technology to create realistic looking facial replacement, look no further. Once revealed, the effectiveness of it is chilling.

“Another Body,” despite its high-tech trick, is a fairly straightforward sleuthing documentary. Linear in its investigation of the crime, it uses modern tech, like Zoom and loads of screen grabs, etc, to tell the story of the grassroots, on-line connections that brought together a number of deepfake victims who form a community in the face of a lack of help from law enforcement. True justice may not be served—in most states deepfakes are not yet illegal—but Klein and the people she uncovers prove that something can be done.