Time Lapse

New to Netflix is Time Lapse (2015) -- a low budget sci-fi thriller.  Time Lapse begins with a certain level of promise and ends in original style.  The middle act suffers a little and one does get the distinct feeling that this is the first movie by director Bradley King.  In fact, it is his directorial debut.  The upside of that is the budget limitation and resulting claustrophobic set with basically three people in a room the entirety of the film, a plus for certain thrillers of this style.

Danielle Panabaker had fine screen presence as Callie.  Matt O'Leary stars as Callie's boyfriend, Finn, a man with a well-balanced moral compass.  Panabaker and O'Leary carry the film, really, with solid performances.  George Finn stars as Jasper, a character whose persona was a little too Kevin Federline for my taste.  Not only was Jasper purposefully made to be unlikable, but there were some weird camera shots of him which made no sense. For instance, in a scene where the three were going over crucial plans in the living room, the camera kept pointing to Jasper chugging away on a half-gallon carton of milk.  The camera would shift to another character who actually had something to say and yet again, inexplicably, point back to Jasper working on his milk.  I began to wonder if the milk would somehow link to the plot, but I think it was more of an editorial oversight as a couple of those swigs should have hit the cutting room floor.  I really liked Amin Joseph's performance as Big Joe and had hopes early on that he'd be in the mix of characters throughout, not just popping in to say hi.  Jason Spisak made an excellent bad guy as Ivan the paranoid bookie.  His thug, Marcus, played by David Figlioli, was a nice touch.  For a moment there after Ivan's entrance I started to have flashbacks of Jesse Pinkman and Walter White sitting on a couch, being interrogated by Tuco!

The strength of Time Lapse rests on the sci-fi plot of a camera which takes pictures 24 hours into the future and the pitfalls of such a contraption that spits out Polaroids.  The untapped potential of this time twister left me a little disappointed in a genre so broad in scope.  For a while in the beginning Time Lapse felt like a more accessible Primer but, unfortunately, lost some steam midway in and came close to falling apart near the end, only to rebound with a remarkably nice ending--literally saved by a hail Mary.  Some recommendations of films in the same vein:  Timecrimes (2007), an excellent sci-fi time travel flick out of Spain, the cult sleeper Frequency (2000) with Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel and notable director Duncan Jones' follow up to Moon -- Source Code (2011) with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Overall, this is a well done sci-fi film debut for first time director Bradley King and here at MHM we will be looking forward to his next film. 3/5