It seems the drone subject or the drone operator is the most famous subject that can’t be told in movies. And that’s something which isn’t easy to develop in terms of the operator’s personality.  In Full Contact, directed by Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek, you will find Ivan, a drone operator who will execute the order to destroy a target inside a school. After that incident, Ivan won’t be able to find peace as guilt will keep eating him from the inside.

When Full Contact begins, we find our hero operating a drone plane while he watches his target. Meantime, there’s always a bit of doubt inside him while he executes his first order. Being psychologically fragile, Ivan continues doing the job he seems not too fond of. When the second order comes, Ivan misses the target, and is ordered to track it and destroy at all cost. When the injured subject enters into a building, the operator reports that he saw a child, however, still executes the order. What happens next with him is the result of guilt arising from killing children. Ivan goes into oblivion, staying away from people to find a new meaning in life and the opportunity to be reborn.

What we find out about Ivan is he keeps his life in private and disconnects himself from other people. Even though he thinks he is strong enough to handle his psychological situation alone, he still struggles doing that while he thorns himself between duty and guilt. Verbeek does an excellent job in studying Ivan’s personality, but sometimes, there’s a feeling that it takes way too long to develop Ivan the way you could understand him better.

Even though the movie itself is executed well and shows how difficult is to be a drone operator, Ivan seems to lose his path mostly because of himself, not because of the failure. Verbeek as writer seems to know where he is about to take Ivan, but unfortunately, by the time he does that, most likely the viewer will have lost all his interest.