In the right hands, cinema can be a highly effective psychological tool. It can provide a window into not necessarily objective reality, but reality as interpreted by a specific person’s perspective. This is why a lot of dream narrative films by David Lynch and even Ari Aster can trip some audiences up, because what they offer isn’t the real world but a delusion of it, where everyone is in actuality just a manifestation of a certain facet of one character’s psyche. It’s one of the main reasons why I love psychological thrillers, or really just psychological art in general… and it’s also one of the reasons why this particular feature so phenomenally let me down.
For a start, the two lead roles just do not work, either on their own or together. No matter what potential layer of reality they’re occupying within the story, they’re not especially likeable, coming across as callous without any real reason when they think it’s the fake world, and Salma Hayek’s Isabel in particular is very on-edge even when it’s the real one. To say nothing of their utter lack of chemistry together, which does zero favours for the malformed romance between them and the even more malformed Neo/Trinity dynamic going on with their place in the story.
Said story is pretty old-hat when it comes to simulation hypothesis, where Isabel tells Owen Wilson’s Greg that the world he’s been living in isn’t real, and they are actually in a generated place detached from their sci-fi utopian reality. While Mike Cahill’s writing brushes against some interesting ideas, like how this simulation was created to give the people living in that utopia some perspective of what life used to be like, it is quite difficult to buy into most of them because, as Greg accuses Isabel of doing at one point, it feels like it’s all being made up as they go along. None of the rules are consistent, neither reality is given enough of a foundation to be worth considering whether they are indeed reality or not, and for all its philosophical musings, it ultimately feels more invested just showing the two leads as Ollie and Ollietta the Magic Bums.
It’s the kind of narrative that’s meant to make the audience question what is real and what is fake, or possibly even consider that both are fake and there’s yet more layers on top of what we are shown. But unfortunately, I just couldn’t bring myself to ponder on such things because it’s just way too flimsy and particularly difficult to take seriously at times. I know that Salma Hayek is a great actress who’s done some incredible work before (hell, I’ll argue to the grave that she was terrific in Eternals), but with her performance here as the entry point to the reality-bending aspects of the plot, it’s not enough to create the intrigue that this brand of sci-fi-adjacent drama needs to succeed.
I’ll be honest and admit that I chose this film to review specifically because it’s been getting some bad reviews since it came out, but I was still perfectly willing to at least hear this film out on its own terms because I love this kind of storytelling so damn much. But unfortunately, I just couldn’t do that because it felt like those terms were being rewritten every other minute, and delivered by creatives that just weren’t comfortable enough with these ideas to make full use of them.
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