The Beta Test

The Beta Test (2021) is a pitch-black Hollywood satire you can watch online on iFILM, written, directed, and starring Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe. Jordan Hines is a talent agent who has it all lined up — an engagement, a career, the right handshakes. Then a purple envelope arrives with no return address and an offer he shouldn't take.

He takes it. What follows is less a thriller about infidelity and more one about data: who sent the envelope, how many others got the same one, and what exactly is being catalogued. The film keeps escalating its paranoia until the personal and the systemic become impossible to separate — an anxious, low-budget indie that turns a one-night transgression into something closer to surveillance horror.

Cummings and McCabe shot the whole thing on the cheap, and the roughness suits a story about systems that operate just out of view. Stream The Beta Test (2021) in good quality on iFILM.