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Reviews
Shifter (2020)
Great premise / weak story
Shifter anchors itself in really captivating premise: time travel as a morbidly dangerous endeavor. The premise is logical and believable. If one were able to travel in time, why wouldn't this dare devil feat result in horrible accidents with our bodies? It's a great premise for making a time travel movie that feels more like David Cronenberg gross-out horror. This is what hooked me into watching the film.
The film's shortcoming is we never understand what drives the main character, the young woman who invents the time machine and travels in it. We never really see her as a scientist: inventing the machine, tinkering with it. She never shares with us or anyone one WHY she has created this machine, other than an opening voice over about how she liked to take apart music boxes. Since she has no friends, other than her cat, no close colleagues, and no close family members, she never shares her internal world with us. She doesn't even share it with her cat. She is a mystery, a closed book. Since we don't understand who she is, it becomes hard to root for her. Or even root against her.
What we are left with is watching her suffer the physical consequences of time travel. Again, a great premise, but in this case, not a great story. She endures her physical maladies and pain - she vomits, she bleeds, she vomits more, and she bleeds more (and repeat) - but her efforts to solve the crisis are near non-existent.
The film ultimately for me became a bleak exploration of loneliness and helplessness. The main character's physical deformities take on a psychological component. When she finally becomes emotionally vulnerable and kisses another women - the best scene in the film because there is real emotional connection -- her physical maladies take over. The time machine sickness is not going to give her a chance at real intimacy and connection. It's a depressing message.
The film was a bit more enjoyable once I let go of trying to understand how the time travel worked. The how and why she travels is largely unexplained. And it requires a heavy dose of suspension of disbelief as to how she created it in the first place. We're told she's smart, but we never really see her be smart. Other than checking out books in the library on quantum physics.
If we knew a little more about who this character is, what her past is, why she is so emotionally blocked, what drove her to make the machine, what are her hopes and fears, the film would be far more interesting. Time travel could be a very apt metaphor for personal change. She is trying to change, to shift, to become something else, to go somewhere else perhaps. The biggest letdown of the movie then is that she really doesn't.