Friday, 23 August 2019

Durante la tormenta (Oriol Paulo, 2018)

It's getting harder and harder for time travel films to distinguish themselves from the torrent that the genre has become, and while Mirage eschews technobabble and indeed physical time travel itself, bar the fact that a woman influences the past and hence the present by talking to someone 25 years earlier on through a TV, it's doubtful whether this is for much gain.
The key point is a 72-hour storm in 2014 that is a replica of one in 1989, and the lead character learns just before finding an old TV in her house that it was on that precise day in the earlier storm that a boy who lived in their house died accidentally. She prevents this from happening, and then finds on waking up that she has no daughter and no-one close to her recognises her. This produces a brand of hysterical denial of glaring reality in her which frankly gets tiresome, since we've been here many times before and it's no fun seeing the protagonist lag so far behind the audience in terms of moving on. In any case, eventually a solution to her predicament must be found, and when it turns up it makes even less sense than the initial divergence event.
It's there emotionally and in terms of mood, but since it sets its stall out to play with butterfly effects and then seems to lose interest in the fiddly mechanics of all that, it has to ultimately be counted a failure.

5/10

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