Rating: NR | Runtime: 84 minutes
Release Date: August 10th, 2023 (Canada/USA)
Studio: Elevation Pictures / XYZ Films
Director(s): Corey Stanton
Writer(s): Corey Stanton

Start the fire yourself and you’ll never get burned.

With nothing but a computer, phone, performative flair, and sociopathic lack of empathy, anyone can get rich. So, that’s exactly what Corey Stanton gives his lead character in Trader. And she (Kimberly-Sue Murray) runs with it. First to steal credit cards, then to purchase legitimate tech products to resell without a paper trail, and finally to bankroll a medicine cabinet full of amphetamines so she’ll never have to stop. A couple hundred here and a couple hundred there is all she needs to pay rent, stock energy drinks, and upgrade her internet connection.

Despite the irony of someone phishing unsuspecting folks online falling prey to a pop-up advertising the appeal of day-trading, graduating to the market is the logical next step. (You can forgive the character’s seeming lack of self-awareness by remembering Stanton brands everything on-screen as a subsidiary of the same fictitious bank to lean into the fact that life is nothing but a rigged game controlled by those in power.) It’s still about manipulating people without a shred of remorse. It simply allows her to do so on a much larger scale.

What follows is a one-woman show of the highs and lows of luck, skill, and ruthless exploitation. Throw in some drug commentary (introducing her dealer and an unregulated drug to “open her mind” more than cocaine might advance the plot and provide connective tissue to where she ultimately sets her sights, but it also plays as an unnecessary segue of bloat considering she’s already been manic enough to not need a “bad trip” as impetus) and touchstones of trauma that may or may not be true and Murray is able to put everything she has into the role. You love to despise her. You want her to win even as you realize the steep price being paid by us.

And more than just a low-budget, hyper-paced descent into the madness of hubristic greed, Trader also becomes an insanely dark look at how broken our world has become where information dispersal is concerned. Because while it’s one thing to have a senior citizen trust an anonymous voice on the phone with his money and another to have casual stock traders fall prey to bot campaigns manipulating their decisions, neither compares to where this character goes to achieve her final form. But that’s what it takes to “win”: an utter lack of morality paired with a keen sense for how desperate people are to be told what to do.

Because in today’s world it’s no longer about being a political tyrant. Now it’s about pulling their strings to sow the sort of fear that turns the masses into helpless baby birds wailing for food and ready to give their souls to whomever provides the tiniest crumb alongside an empty promise of more. The film might ultimately use its main character in much the same way as she does everyone else to those ends, but doesn’t that just drive home the point further?

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Kimberly-Sue Murray in TRADER; courtesy of XYZ Films.