Review: TIME LAPSE, Sharp Sci-Fi Thriller

 

At 20, everyone wants to be an artist, and Finn (Matt O'Leary, looking absolutely nothing like bespectacled teenager, The Brain, from Brick these days) is struggling to live the dream. His day job as superintendent of Sycamore Apartments entails fixing old ladies' blocked toilets, and competes as a distraction to overcoming a nasty case of creative blockage with his pill-popping, dog-race obsessed roommate, Jasper (George Finn), and his not-quite-nagging-but-still-neglected girlfriend Callie (Danielle Panabaker) and her subtle pleas for attention.  

 

Greed and the potential freedom to pursue their future trumps any concerns of invading their neighbour's privacy, or, for that matter, why he was invading theirs with his time machine test protocols. Things are also quickly brought to a head when they spot their neighbour's weirdly charred corpse nearby. Did he die because he violated the images dictated in the Polaroids from the future? Or perhaps being too close to whatever possible radiation that the machine gives off? Nope, definitely the former.

 

Before you can say Shallow Grave, the three of them are off to the races, literally and figuratively and conspicuously enough to draw the curiosity of Jasper's thuggish bookie. And a now daily struggle with the clock emerges, as well as the impossible to ignore tomorrow-photos that show Callie cheating on Finn with Jasper in plain sight in the living room. There is also a deluge of exciting canvass work done by Finn. 

 

Trapped by a desire -- or need -- to match their reality to the photos, the three roommates create a horrific, Cassandra Complex nightmare inflected by the best of those classic Twilight Zone episodes. Finn is now forced to make copies of his own future paintings that he sees in the photos, Callie forced to kiss Jasper for the camera in front of her boyfriend, all to save their lives from causality-death and pay their intimidating gangster boss. The camera lens becomes a death's head from the adjacent apartment, a beast that needs to be fed the future it spits out every 24 hours.

 

Dominated by clocks and spirals, the browns of wood paneling and cheap student furniture bathed in the green glow of metaphysical hell, Time Lapse presents a new mystery of circumstance for its now unwilling victims to solve every day to save their lives. Or possibly playing poor fools for attempting to live up to the events in these almost context-free Polaroids. 

 

The movie might sag a tiny bit in the middle as characters are getting tied up and weapons are broken out in the tiny abode (another stand-by in low budget genre thrillers). But, like a great science fiction short story, you know the the ones with a pristine core idea, it saves the real goods for the closing act.  The film plays with the established rules in ways that are clever, consistent, and yield brilliant results. This is always a tricky mix for any movie that deals with the paradoxes of time travel, and the director and a game cast of bright young thinngs pull it off in spades. Time Lapse is a great calling card for bigger things to come.

 

Ultimately a lesson here (as with any good roommate drama) is that trust amongst friends or, for that matter, enemies, would solve a lot of problems, stabilize a lot of delicate situations, and strengthen relationships to build a quality common future. Or, perhaps more importantly, don't fuck with time.