User Reviews

This is an imaginative indie film from the great Michael Legge that begins covering the same territory as _Office Space_, and may make you want to mumble about burning down the building, but Legge takes you to a different place entirely, with enough subtle clues that it stands up to multiple viewings.

For anyone who has ever worked in an office, this film displays the tensions as accurately as _Office Space_ (another great film), also did, but works on a completely different level, that achieved by later films like _Fight Club_ or _Mullholland Dr._ What you're seeing is never objectively what is happening except (maybe) at the end of the film, when it generates the question of how it could be possible for a person of the past to dream up such a recognizable future, our present, distorted by what in their own life's experience is the norm. The more out of sync characters begin to behave, the more normal they are actually behaving for the lead character's reality.

To read this much of the review, although I've deliberately not been too specific, knowing just what I've told you might be enough to figure out what is going on long before it's over, so you have been warned.

Much like _Fight Club_, the main character is an insomniac, and has difficulty telling what is and is not real. When he is told he killed the Pope (who looks like John Paul II, but clearly is not (rather than whoever was Pope when the time-tripper came from, which is never clear)), he doesn't believe it, but like Tyler Durden, as an insomniac he can't believe what he sees in either way, so he has to determine that the Pope's supposed visit is not in the Boston Globe before he can confront the guy who claimed that he ran him over.

Another interesting twist is that the most sympathetic character beyond the main character is the one who is, on one level, giving him his exit to the true? reality, but like all his allies, becomes completely demented in the dream world by its end.

Although this is, ultimately, a rather silly film, its realistic portrayal of office life at the beginning and its twists and turns all make this a hugely thought provoking one. Recommended for anyone who doesn't demand high production values for a film (shot on 16mm) set in an office.