Time Lapse

Every so often, I will stumble upon a hidden gem while looking through the various movies available to rent online. Once such find was a little movie I found called Time Lapse. Now, I should preface this review by saying that I am such a sucker for movies like this that it's not even funny. I have loved films dealing with any variation of time travel since I was a little kid. This movie is a nice little twist on the genre adding some new thoughts on the idea of fate and predestination.

The film focuses on three friends and roommates, Finn (played by Matt O'Leary), Jasper (played by George Finn) and Callie (played by Danielle Panabaker). They all live together in a two bedroom apartment. Callie and Finn are together with Jasper as their roommate/proverbial third wheel. Finn is the apartment complex's on site manager and handyman as well as a struggling painter. After getting a call that their neighbor across the courtyard is late on his rent and noticing stacks of newspapers outside his door, they decided to check out his apartment and make sure he is alright. What they discover inside the apartment is certainly not what they expected. There is a giant camera, roughly the size of a sofa and emanating a weird green glow pointed directly at their apartment. Along one of the walls are rows and rows of Polaroid photos of their apartment (apparently they like living in a fishbowl because their curtains are never drawn). The camera takes another photo and spits out a new Polaroid. When it develops, they realize it doesn't match the way their living room is now. Before long, they figure out the camera somehow is able to take a picture of 24 hours in the future.  

Fascinated by the possibilities, Jasper immediately sees the camera as an opportunity to get rich quick. The other two are just curious to get a daily glimpse into the future, but making some extra dough appeals to them as well. Sure enough, when the next picture comes through the following day, it shows all three of them in front of their living room window and Jasper has helpfully taped up the days race results so his past self knows how to make his bets. Finn is surprised to see a finished painting as well since he had been blocked and unable to paint anything in months. Afraid of what might happen if the deviate from the events in the photo and commit to recreating it exactly each night at 8 o'clock when the timer on the camera goes off. This works well enough for a few weeks with Jasper knowing which bets to make and Finn getting a new painting to paint each day. Things take a turn for the worse when Jasper's shady bookie starts to get suspicious about how Jasper is suddenly getting so lucky (because the idiot never thought to fake a few losses to throw off suspicion), throwing all three roommates into danger. 

This was a tense little thriller with enough twists and turns to keep a viewer guessing. All three roommates are portrayed well and are suitably convincing as three friends who have been living together for quite awhile.  The script by Bradley King and BP Cooper was well done and tightly plotted. It stands up to the sort of scrutiny that time travel movies tend to get. The film has a couple of clear influences, mainly the Twilight Zone, specifically the episode "A Most Unusual Camera" and perhaps also "Nick of Time" with the aspect of how addicted the three roommates become on seeing the next days photo. As the film went along it also started to remind me a lot of Danny Boyle's 1994 thriller, Shallow Grave, in the way the roommates started to distrust one another and become more paranoid as the film went on. 

Overall, Time Lapse was a nifty little Indie time travel thriller. What it lacks in big budget action spectacle that dominates today's genre blockbusters it more than makes up for with some great storytelling that gripped me from beginning to end. If you're a fan of the Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits and are in the mood for something that has a similar flavor with those shows tendency towards dark irony, this is one worth checking out.