Anti-social networks

Henry-Alex Rubin is cradling his smartphone lovingly. "I have a relationship with this," he admits. "I love it. I panic when I think it's gone."

Like most of us, the filmmaker's umbilical-like attachment to his gadget comes from the connectivity it offers - access to e-mail and the internet, especially his beloved photo-sharing site. "I know that I'm on my phone too much," he says. "But I think everyone is dealing with this; it's not just me."

Not everyone will make a film about it, however. But the co-director (together with Dana Adam Shapiro) of the Oscar-nominated documentary Murderball (2005) now returns with his first fictional movie, Disconnect. It stems, he says, from wrestling with a series of questions about technology in today's society that intrigued him - everything from the etiquette of texting and using your phone at the dinner table to the ethics of spying on your child's online activity or the dangers of placing too many personal details on the web.

Told in three separate but loosely connected tales - think Paul Haggis' Oscar-winning Crash but for social media - Disconnect is a stark warning about the dangers that lurk in cyberspace. Not that Rubin, as you might think from his love of his iPhone, is a technophobe. "I love technology," he says. "It's the most incredible thing that we've invented as humans. It's put men on the moon but it's also created the atom bomb. But technology is a tool, it's amoral."

Indeed, as Disconnect shows, technology in the wrong hands can be a deadly weapon. In one story, a lonely teenager (Jonah Bobo) is the victim of cyber-bullying, after two classmates trick him into revealing intimate photographs via a fake Facebook account. In another, a young mother (Paula Patton) finds comfort in an online chat-room after the death of her child, only to discover that a fellow user has stolen her identity. A third plot revolves around a journalist (Andrea Riseborough) who tries to expose a sex webcam business.

As the title suggests, the film - which also stars Jason Bateman and Hope Davis - primarily deals with the way that a technology designed to bring us together can often leave us feeling isolated. "That's really what I'm focusing on in this movie," says Rubin. "You may feel more connected to someone, but the irony is you're not. You may seem to have many more friends, but you don't, because everything is so much more superficial than when you can look into someone's eyes."

When the script (written by Andrew Stern) came to Rubin, he immediately related - not least because "they were all stories that I would've absolutely made documentaries about". Given his non-fiction film background, the first thing the director did was find real-life counterparts to match the characters Stern had written. "It was a bit of a reverse-engineered documentary - the research came afterwards. Andrew himself did a lot of research, obviously, to write his script, but I wanted real, physical people - it's the only way I know how to do things."