The Takeover starts from a premise that sounds like a pitch made to a producer in a hurry. Mel Bandison (Holly Mae Brood), a self-proclaimed ethical hacker, stops a data breach on a high-tech self-driving bus. In doing so she shuts down an international criminal network. Good deed, wrong people. Her reward is a target on her back and a deepfake video that appears to show her murdering someone. Annemarie van de Mond directs this 2022 mix of action, crime and thriller, and the setup is honest about what it wants to be.

The best idea in it is an irony. Mel’s trade is knowing how easily a screen can lie, so a forged video is the one weapon she should see coming and the one she can least easily argue against. Turning her own field against her is a neat reversal. It also lets the film ask something larger than the plot needs: what is a person worth when the only record of her is something anyone can manufacture? The film does not push very far into that question. It is a genre piece, and it mostly treats the deepfake as an engine for the chase. But it is a good engine, and the premise earns some credit for choosing a threat that sits close to ordinary life rather than a bomb on a timer. Most of us have by now seen a fake clip pass for the real thing, and the film knows that its audience arrives with that unease already installed.

The title has been used before. Muriel Spark published a novel called The Takeover in 1976, and a 1995 American film carries the same name; Jay-Z’s 2001 song is simply called Takeover. In business a takeover is one company buying another. Here the word is stretched to cover control of systems, of an image, of a whole life. Whether the film carries that weight is another matter, but the stretch at least gives the title a job beyond sounding tough.

Holly Mae Brood has the harder job. A hacker is a difficult character to put on screen, because the work is mostly sitting still, and the actor has to make that stillness matter before the running begins. Brood plays Mel as a person worth rooting for rather than a puzzle to solve, someone whose competence and stubbornness sit side by side, and I found it easy to side with her. That matters, because the whole film depends on it. When a story takes away its heroine’s name, her freedom and her proof, the audience needs to feel the loss in her face, and Brood gives it to us without overplaying it.

Géza Weisz plays Thomas Deen, and the rest of the cast fills out Mel’s world: Susan Radder as Roos, Frank Lammers as Buddy, Noortje Herlaar as Linde van Erp, Walid Benmbarek as Idriss, Lawrence Sheldon as Rogers, Jenny Hsia credited as Teamlid and Mike Wijdenbosch as Robin. Faye Kimmijser appears as Young Mel. A thriller about a woman isolated by a lie lives or dies on the people around her, on who believes her and who does not. Lammers brings the most recognisable screen presence of the group, and the film leans on that. With a cast this long, though, I wished for more room for the supporting characters to be something other than a function in Mel’s story.

The film is less sure of itself once the setup is behind it. The opening promises speed, and for a while the story delivers. Then the middle stretch leans on explanation, and the momentum goes slack just when the stakes should tighten. The deepfake thread is the most interesting part of the story and, at times, the most rushed. A few of the criminal network’s schemes are tangled enough to test the patience of a viewer who only wants to know who is chasing Mel and why. The tone wobbles as well. The film wants to be a pulpy chase and a more brooding story about technology and trust, and it does not always settle on one voice.

None of that sinks it. This is the familiar story of an innocent person on the run, and its freshness comes from the digital detail rather than the structure. Wrongly accused heroes have been fleeing across screens for decades, and the question is always texture. Here the texture is a world in which evidence can be built from nothing, so the old chase plot gets a reason to exist now. A fugitive used to be hunted because someone had seen her. Mel is hunted because someone has made a video, and no witness is needed.

The Takeover is a solid, sometimes uneven thriller with a sharp central irony and a lead who carries it. It will not change the genre, and it leaves its best question half asked. Still, it knows its audience and treats its heroine with respect. I would watch Van de Mond’s next film on the strength of this premise alone, and I would hope it spends a little more time on the ideas it only gestures at here.