Akan Satayev’s Hacker follows a young Ukrainian immigrant in Canada from credit-card fraud to the orbit of a dark-web network called DarkWeb. Behind it sits an unusual production: a Toronto company, a Kazakh director and Kazakh money.

Hacker, directed by Akan Satayev, follows Alex Danyliuk (Callan McAuliffe), the son of a Ukrainian family that emigrates to Canada and ends up living on welfare. Alex grows up with few friends and a great deal of time online, and his first income comes from working as a “clicker”, generating traffic that earns websites their revenue. When the bank that employed his mother lets her go, the family loses its last steady wage. Later, after he leaves home to study in Toronto, the money he needs comes from somewhere else: with Sye (Daniel Eric Gold), a street-wise hustler who knows the black market, he starts working lost and stolen credit cards and fake transactions.

The turning point is a scheme against the very bank that fired his mother. Alex is caught, and he talks his way out by offering Curtis (Zachary Bennett), the bank’s head of security, to fix its unsecured website and computers for free in exchange for letting him and Sye walk away. Word of the episode leaks onto DarkWeb, an online criminal network, where hacking a bank by turning up at it in person earns him a reputation and the attention of its masked head, a figure known only as Zed (Clifton Collins Jr.).

Kira (Lorraine Nicholson), a young hacker Sye contacts online, brings the pair new methods, printing their own credit cards and moving money through Bitcoin, and the trio’s earnings climb until a sale to a group of buyers goes wrong and they relocate to Hong Kong. There a run on the city’s cash machines yields $2.3 million, with a DarkWeb calling card left behind after every withdrawal, and Zed makes contact with a job that comes with a warning: failure will cost them and their families their lives. The last act turns on that job, which reaches as far as the Federal Reserve and the stock market, and on what each member of the group has kept from the others. This article leaves those turns for the viewer.

A Toronto company, a Kazakh director

Hacker began in Toronto. In February 2013 the producer and screenwriter Sanzhar Sultan, then still credited as Sanzhar Sultanov, launched the production company Know Rules Media with the Canadian venture capitalist Loudon Owen, a fellow graduate of Upper Canada College. In September 2013 the company partnered with Akan Satayev and his studio Sataifilm, and the first teaser for the project was shown that same month during the Toronto International Film Festival. Brillstein Entertainment Partners came on board as executive producer.

Much of the money came from Kazakhstan. The investors named at the time included the Kazakh businessman Kenes Rakishev, investing on behalf of Mobli, the photo and video sharing app, and the app even has a small place inside the story. The film was announced as a $5 million production to be shot in New York, Toronto, Dubai and Bangkok. The finished film is set, and was shot, across Toronto, Hong Kong, New York and Bangkok, with Pasha Patriki as director of photography and Álex Márquez as editor.

The writing credits are shared by Satayev, Sultan and Timur Zhaksylykov. When the project was announced it was presented as based on real events, the case of a young immigrant drawn into a cyber-criminal organisation called DarkWeb that made its money from credit-card scams, and Sultan described it as the story of a young man who finds an easy way to make money through hacking without realising, at first, that easy money has serious consequences. Later descriptions of the finished film still call it loosely based on real events; none of them names the case.

Where Hacker sits in Akan Satayev’s career

Akan Satayev was born in Karaganda in 1971 to two actors who played leading roles at the Karaganda Drama Theatre, where he spent much of his childhood. He graduated from the cinema and television department of the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in 1994, having played the lead, the student Azat, in Kaldybay Abenov’s Allazhar, a film about the December 1986 protests in Alma-Ata. After graduating he acted and directed commercials, and in 2003 he founded Sataifilm, the company that produced his debut feature, the crime drama Racketeer, in 2007.

By the time Hacker was announced, two of his films, Strayed (2009) and the historical epic Myn Bala (2012), had been Kazakhstan’s entries for the foreign-language Oscar, and Hacker was billed as his first foreign project: an English-language production with actors from Australia, the United States and Canada. The years that followed took him back home and into bigger productions. In 2016 he founded the Astana Film Fund to back young Kazakh directors and low-budget independent films, and shot The Road to Mother, a period drama that Kazakhstan selected for the Oscars in 2017. The historical epic Tomiris followed in 2019, and from 2020 to 2022 he ran Kazakhfilm, the country’s largest film studio. In 2025 he returned to the series that launched him with Racketeer 3.

The cast

Callan McAuliffe, the Australian actor who plays Alex, was born in 1995 and came to the role with a run of studio credits behind him: the lead in Rob Reiner‘s Flipped (2010), Sam in I Am Number Four, and the young Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby (2013). Hacker was not even his first story about young hackers. In 2012 he appeared in the Australian television film Underground: The Julian Assange Story as one of the teenage Assange’s friends in the International Subversives. From 2017 to 2022 he played Alden in The Walking Dead.

Lorraine Nicholson, born in Los Angeles in 1990 to the actors Jack Nicholson and Rebecca Broussard, was best known for playing the surfer Alana Blanchard in Soul Surfer (2011). In Hacker she plays Kira, an expert hacker. Alongside acting she has written and directed short films; the third, Life Boat, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017, the same year she was accepted into the AFI Directing Workshop for Women.

Clifton Collins Jr., who plays Zed, is the grandson of the actor Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez and a veteran of crime stories, from the gangster César Sánchez in One Eight Seven (1997) to Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic (2000) and the killer Perry Smith in Capote (2005). In 2016, the year Hacker reached cinemas, he was also appearing as Lawrence in Westworld, and in 2021 his lead role in Jockey won a Special Jury Award for acting at the Sundance Film Festival. Daniel Eric Gold, who plays Sye, comes from the New York stage, where he was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for Craig Lucas’s Small Tragedy, and television audiences know him as Matt Hartley in Ugly Betty. Zachary Bennett, Curtis in the film, is the Canadian actor who played Felix King in Road to Avonlea.

Release, and the other title

Hacker was released in Thailand in September 2016. In the United States it had a limited release on December 2, 2016 under the title Anonymous, the same name as the hacking collective, and Sony Pictures then released it on home entertainment. Other markets renamed it again: in Germany it is Dark Web – Kontrolle ist eine Illusion, in Italy Hacker – Soldi facili. It arrived in a busy stretch for screen stories about hacking, a year after Michael Mann‘s Blackhat and in the same autumn as Oliver Stone‘s Snowden.

What sets Hacker apart on paper is its angle. Its hacker is neither a genius nor an activist, but the son of an immigrant family who turns to card fraud after a bank lets his mother go, and the film is a rare object in production terms: a Canadian-produced, Kazakh-directed and largely Kazakh-financed English-language thriller. It is also a short detour in Akan Satayev’s career, his first foreign project, made between Kazakh-language productions on either side of it. Whether the film makes the most of that premise is a question each viewer can settle; what the record shows is a modest genre thriller with an unusual origin, a cast drawn from three countries and a story about where easy money leads.