I sincerely hope time loop movies don't become a sub-genre. The idea is interesting enough to support maybe 2 or 3 movies, of which 1 or maybe 2 are actually good. And those 1 or maybe 2 have already been made (they're "Triangle" and maybe "Primer", -not even sure on the latter, because it's so confusing nobody has ever figured out if it's actually a good movie or not.)
This one is a better-told story than "Lake Artifact", for sure, but that's a pretty low bar to clear, and the fact that the more movies on this theme get made the sloppier and less original they seem to be getting makes me worry it's going to be done to death á la "found footage". Extra poor marks in this for making the characters-there's only two characters in this movie-the sort of bickering, instantly unlikeable couple that some filmmakers, who I assume are themselves in long-term relationships that are less than perfect, seem to think are fascinating to watch carp endlessly at each other, when really they're just tedious and annoying. I wouldn't want to be stuck in a time loop with these people, either, I was tired of them after about 5 minutes. And especially low marks for transparently using the time loop and its variations as a heavy-handed metaphor for the facets of a codependent relationship. Great, director, I'm glad you worked out your relationship issues with 90 minutes of my time. Plus some ideas where just taken directly from "Triangle" (Oh, wait, sorry, here it's earbuds. In "Triangle" it was a necklace, that's a *totally* different idea.)
There's a couple of cool scenes and neat ideas here and there, sure, but nothing that wasn't explored much better in, once again, "Triangle", and that film had great plotting, whereas here, a lot of the characters' behavior seems to stem less from any kind of understandable motivation or logic than from the writer saying, "Wouldn't it be cool if they did this?" Like, is there some rule about being in a time loop that says you have to start killing your other selves? Why? Towards the end, a reason does eventually emerge-and TBH it's a pretty good one, the only thing I liked about this movie-but it still doesn't explain at all why they started killing their alternate-timeline selves almost immediately.
Strangely, actually, the end of the movie is actually pretty good... in an unusual turn of events, the end kind of redeems an otherwise totally unenjoyable and derivative movie. It's too bad they waited that long, though. The first 2/3 of it is so tedious and predictable that long before it ever got to the belatedly enjoyable denouement, I had already just become annoyed and impatient for it to be over.
I actually did like the end enough that I thought for a minute I might eventually watch this movie again-they really pulled off a hail mary pass with the third act-but the truth is, two totally unrelatable, unlikable people bickering at each other just isn't interesting to me, even when you use a time-travel metaphor to make the point "relationships are complicated". The admittedly cool payoff just isn't worth sitting through an hour and fifteen minutes of that again.
I checked out the original short, "The Pond". It tells essentially the same story, including pretty much anything and everything that's cool about "Brightwood", but minus the tedious bickering and relationship exploration, in under 17 minutes. That tells you how much of this movie is obsessed with just relationship exploration navel-gazing. And even "The Pond" didn't manage to go 16 minutes without ripping off ideas from "Triangle" wholesale.
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