I'll Follow You Down (2014)

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is a film that I honestly didn't see coming. For starters, it was a totally new concept (at least for me) to have a time-travel film that follows the people left behind by the time traveller, rather than the traveller himself. For a while I was disappointed to be missing out on the adventure, but the characters and events were compelling enough that I soon got sucked into an interesting and nuanced drama about loss and abandonment.And then, when I had almost forgotten about the time-travel angle, the son of the original time-traveller, now grown-up, travels back in time to visit his father in the past (where he's on his way to a visit with Einstein) and, without wanting to spoil anything, the method the son uses to convince his father to go back to the future was utterly unexpected.This was a film filled with subtlety, nuance, originality, and thoughtfulness. It was dramatic without being melodramatic. It was tragic without being depressing. It was intellectual without being pompous. It was adventurous without being mindless. It was science-fiction without being... well... science-fiction.And it was also very nicely made, with attractive cinematography, a pleasant orchestral score, leafy collegial locations, solid direction, and a respectable, talented cast.I didn't have any hopes or expectations when I started watching. But by the end I was utterly captivated and somewhat blown away by the originality of what I'd just watched. I love it when a movie does that, as it's a rare treat that doesn't come around very often.

I think I would like to warn you off of this one.The opportunity that time travel stories offers is the ability to retroactively change what you have seen.In normal stories, this is one of the most effective devices we have, a way for the author to toy with the very act of comprehending the world. It can be cast as a game between author and viewer as they cocreate the story and tease each other. Time machine movies make that explicit. Con and deceptive movies also do this, make the game an explicit part of the contract.But for it to work, the force of what changes has to be strong enough to be accepted by the viewer, provide enough energy to drive the reinvention of what we have already accepted. Chris Nolan is a master of this; I'll trust him explicitly, investing more in what he offers as the setup than in anyone else. Many time travel movies get this.Looper, Primer and Predestination are movies that don't exploit this, presenting puzzles that are intriguing but use travel of the old fashioned kind, the H G Welles kind the we simply watch. But this film depends on the reinvention; the characters talk about it for an hour.A man is a genius college professor. He has a greater genius son, also a professor, who figures out time travel. Alas, it involves coils, a cabinet and a flash of light. He gets incidentally killed on his first trip back. Those that are left are unhappy with their lives. His son is the greatest genius of the bunch and reinvents the machine to go back to change things, but only a few things.The last five minutes is what this genius comes up with, when he goes back in time to meet his newly arrived Dad. If you are like me, someone who expects some narrative magic, who wants that thrill you get on first watching The Sting or Sixth Sense, you will be disappointed and a bit angry. Much else in this film is done well. The score in particular is good.You'll get hints of the disappointment. A lone genius poring over an equation-laden chalkboard looking for that one insignificant error, as if it were the point of the movie, Poirot-style. Some poorly researched mumbo jumbo about relativity and quantum mechanics as if they were the solution to a next generation of understanding rather than barriers. A final revelation that produces absolute confidence. Simple interpersonal dynamics, the kind you can sketch on a timeline without missing anything essential. (That timeline is actually a prop in the story.)And then we get the end, the action our genius among genies has calculated with similar precision.But it makes no sense. I usually don't need or even want sense in a film, but you need it here if you expect us to reweave things. And we don't get it.

Erol (Haley Joel Osment) and his grandfather (Victor Garber) work together using quantum physics to develop the ability to travel back in time, with the aim of repairing a family shattered by the disappearance 12 years earlier of Erol's father (Rufus Sewell). This is a movie about relationships and the possible selfish impacts of time travel upon them. For example, if Erol travels back in time to prevent his father's disappearance, how can he guarantee his fiancée (Susanna Fournier) that they will still be together in the new version of the present day? This is not an action movie. There are no special effects. It is essentially a mystery drama with time travel acting as the primary plot device.I enjoyed the movie. Its definitely not perfect. A little slow in places. I read several reviewers complain about the casting of Haley Joel Osment. I thought he was fine, though given his physical appearance it is hard to imagine him being the son of Rufus Sewell and Gillian Anderson and the grandson of Victor Garber. However, if you can suspend your disbelief and believe that a couple of men writing mathematical equations on a chalk board can make time travel possible, then anything is possible.

I'll Follow You Down is NOT a typical scifi-suspense-thriller. There are no automatic weapons or time cops. There is no high-tech research centre. There is in fact no "action" as delivered by most cinema these days, and only minimal, situationally necessary violence. The film is presented and paced like a stage play. The first hour (or more) is used to set the stage for the decisive events that occur in the final act, if you will. It is certainly slow-paced and "talkie," and calls the viewer back to another, earlier era in film-making. Honestly, the acting is not gripping, the characters aren't deeply developed, and suspension of disbelief in the technological ideas is difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, there is a level at which this modestly-budgeted made-in-Canada effort does succeed. That is, I found myself truly caring how everything would play out for the characters, and for how they would resolve their struggles with their dilemmas... which were mostly further losses following (minor spoiler) a father's disappearance early on. The themes were universal enough to be engaging. I'd say that the majority of the issues addressed were unstated, and the film's resolution of most of them was equivocal at best. The time travel theme has been much better developed elsewhere, yet, this film still had something, perhaps unique, to say. Finally, the "disappeared" father must face a stark dilemma, and the final minutes of the film deliver the moral of the story, which, if simplistic, did not ring false, at least in "this timeline." In terms of contemporary productions, an effort like Continuum develops a far more sophisticated and complex vision of time travel --- one that makes you stretch, and stretch again. This film doesn't do that at all, nor does it attempt to. The idea of time travel is really secondary to the primary and overriding moral theme. But... please allow me to conclude it like this: Had this been a stage production, it would in fact have worked --- and that is not easy to say for most ideas developed in science fiction film. This is a slow boiler for a quiet and contemplative evening, and not much at all like most other science fiction movies.