‘Parallel’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
In 2021, this column featured a Canadian movie about multiverses called “Parallel.” Now here comes an American movie about multiverses called “Parallel,” based on a Chinese movie about multiverses called “Parallel Forest.” Déjà vu all over again?
The greatest asset of Kourosh Ahari’s “Parallel” is the wonderful Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”), who confirms she can not only suggest depths of psychic pain but also throw herself into a part’s physical demands. Tormented by her child’s death, Vanessa is trying to get away from her thoughts at an idyllic lakeside house with her husband, Alex, and his brother, Martel (played by the real-life siblings Aldis and Edwin Hodge, who also co-wrote the film with Jonathan Keasey). Out for a walk in the woods, Vanessa narrowly avoids being shot — by a woman who looks just like her. Discrepancies begin to pop up in what she thought she knew about her own life; Alex and Martel’s behavior and even their very identities become unpredictable, to the point that she’s never quite sure who she’s talking to. The movie can be confusing as the parallel realities become ever more complex, but it eventually coalesces into a poignant tale about the stories we tell ourselves in order to deal with traumatic events.
‘Dream Scenario’
Stream it on Max.
Aggressively average, Paul Matthews is an evolutionary biologist stuck on the academic ladder and watching, with bitter, powerless envy, some of his peers take off. This sounds like the premise for a Paul Giamatti vehicle, but the central role of “Dream Scenario” is played by Nicolas Cage, who brings completely different baggage to the story. Paul, you see, acquires viral fame when he starts popping up in people’s dreams. He is recognized everywhere he goes and while he has zero control about his starring role in people’s unconscious, he still becomes a living meme — a familiar experience for Cage, a frequent subject of memes rather than dreams. Kristoffer Borgli’s surreal dark comedy can be read as a meta commentary on fame, particularly that of Cage himself. Seen from a science-fiction perspective, however, the casting is a red herring and the movie becomes a disturbing description of invasive marketing campaigns and, down the line, direct mind control. Borgli parallels this vision with a concomitant one of destructive herd mentality, and how easy it is for a mob to form. The combination of those two strains truly is the stuff nightmares are made of.
One random day, a strange life form turns up in the bedroom closet of a young woman (Kaoru Koide). We don’t know the nature of the creature or how it got in there, only that it seems to have just one thing in mind, and it’s not killing earthlings, for a change. Be warned that Ken’ichi Ugana’s film is not for the prude or the squeamish, as its first of four sections features abundant sex of the tentacled, polymorphous kind. The special effects are primitive, almost defiantly so — at times “Extraneous Matter: Complete Edition” made me think of an unlikely papier-mâché hybrid of “Little Shop of Horrors” and Andrzej Zulawski’s classic “Possession” — but oddly this makes them more effective, not less. The creatures are especially striking as a lo-fi counterpoint to human characters plagued with anomie and aimlessness. As the film (which was extended from a 2020 short, as its title indicates) progresses, it’s obvious that what Ugana is really concerned with is the unbearable loneliness imposed by modern living, and our inability to connect with others. What a true oddity this project is.
‘Time Addicts’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
Australian dirtbag cinema tends to be set in the outback, but there are exceptions: Sam Odlum’s movie takes place in Melbourne. The foul-mouthed, rather dim Johnny (Charles Grounds) and his slightly sharper friend Denise (Freya Tingley) are addicts so desperate for a hit that they agree to do a job for their dealer, Kane (Joshua Morton): They’ll retrieve a bag of crystal meth left in a derelict house, with strict instructions not to sample the goods. Except, of course, Johnny does, and poof — he is whisked back to 1995.
The contraband “temporal narcotic” allows Johnny to hopscotch back and forth through the decades, both past and future (Melbourne in 2053, we are told, is barely livable). In short order, Denise follows him in time-traveling escapades and the pair crisscross timelines, meeting the undercover cop Tracey (Elise Jansen) along the way. The best part, besides the imaginative variations on a certain curse word, is the detective work required of the viewer to follow the trail of visual and aural cues that Odlum spreads throughout the film. Rest assured they do tie up in the end.
‘Suzume’
Stream it on Netflix.
The Japanese director Makoto Shinkai is regularly hailed as one of the modern masters of animation, and this dense, action-packed film helps show why (even if newcomers to his world might want to start with “Your Name,” from 2017).
When the high school student Suzume finds herself in front of a door that seems to float on a lake, little does she realize the responsibility she is about to inherit: The door is one of several such portals throughout Japan that could let out a gigantic earthquake-causing energy worm, and Suzume must find them and close them. She is helped by the handsome Souta — handsome, that is, until a cat transforms him into a talking three-legged chair. Let’s just say that few directors besides Shinkai (and Hayao Miyazaki, to whom he is often compared) could pull off a central character consisting of a chair jabbering as it cavorts around the countryside.
A breathless sense of adventure courses through the visually stunning “Suzume,” which adroitly works both as an allegory for Japan’s life under the constant threat of earthquakes and as a coming-of-age story that is graceful and often funny. But it also acknowledges death looming over our lives.
