‘Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia’ Review: Grandiose Pursuits

“Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia,” by the director Salima Koroma, appears at first look like many different current rise-and-fall narratives, which normally describe, in sensational phrases, the hubristic ascent and Icarian plunge of Silicon Valley start-ups, social media platforms, cellphone producers and even online game builders.

The story of HQ Trivia, the short-lived smartphone quiz recreation that captured the favored creativeness for about six months beginning within the winter of 2017, does share a couple of superficial similarities with “The Social Network” and this 12 months’s excellent “Blackberry,” particularly the interpersonal friction that arose between HQ’s co-founders — Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, who died of a drug overdose in December 2018 — together with the same old company infighting, monetary drama and callow jockeying for energy which have change into hallmarks of the style. Big egos clashed; fortunes swelled and vanished. And all of it, to an out of doors observer, has the lurid thrill of a real-life “Game of Thrones.”

But the documentary “Glitch” is slyer and smarter than a few of its paint-by-numbers dramatized contemporaries, and the story it prefers to inform is extra attention-grabbing and complicated than the battle of two domineering egoists who got here up with a novelty app. Koroma shrewdly situates HQ in a number of interlocking contexts, from the historical past of the tv recreation present to the long-evolving panorama of social media and cell video streaming. She understands that this dwell trivia app aspired to nothing lower than a revolution in broadcasting, and she or he makes a compelling case for seeing its achievements (and its potential) in that gentle.

She additionally will get a whole lot of mental mileage out of a bevy of insightful and entertaining speaking heads, significantly the journalist Taylor Lorenz, a former New York Times reporter who relates the weird controversy surrounding the publication of an HQ-related puff piece with mordant glee, and the previous HQ host Scott Rogowsky, whose off-kilter charisma and nearly old school showman’s patter are as pleasant right here as they had been when he was the app’s beloved star. In the top, the documentary strikes a bemused tone that matches its unusual and oddly pleasant topic, completely encapsulated by Rogowsky’s chopping final remarks: “Oh — that all actually happened.”

Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Max.