Director – Robi Michael – 2019 – US – 97m
***1/2
Reality disintegrates around a man tormented by the accidental, childhood death of his sister – on VoD from Monday, October 26th
People who’ve apparently died then come back to life have often reported the sensation of going down a dark tunnel towards the light, which they then haven’t reached because they’ve been brought back to life. That motif is realised a repeated, clumsy special effect at various points in Every Time I Die, along with more subtle and arguably more successful variants on the same theme, such as a child waking up in a hospital room where the door is slightly ajar revealing a light source beyond.
Other elements recur too: protagonist Sam (Drew Fonteiro) repeatedly feels a pain in his head and blacks out, only to repeatedly come to or wake up in another scenario. He wakes as a young lad of eight (Kenneth Moronta), a camera on the table in front of him, in the hospital room with the door ajar and the light beyond, Then he wakes up, in that device we’ve seen so many times in movies where it was all a dream. Here he wakes staring at the face of Mia (Melissa Macedo) who has spent the night with him and now must leave early to go back to her husband Tyler (Tyler Dash White), a soldier recently returned from several months away on active duty.
Or perhaps not, because again he wakes up and Mia cooks him fried eggs for breakfast. Except that, before completing the task, he watches her stand seemingly frozen in time before the stove. Perhaps he’s dreaming. In shades of Lucid (Adam Morse, 2018), he keeps touching his fingers to check whether he’s awake or asleep.
There are five characters in Sam’s present: Sam, Mia, Mia’s husband Tyler, Sam’s partner on an ambulance crew Jay (Marc Menchaca) and Jay’s wife Polly (Michelle Macedo), Mia’s sister. In his past, there’s Sam’s little sister Sara, six (Frankie Hinton), who fatally fell off a cliff during an argument with him, and their grieving parents (Paul Megna, Lia Johnson), with their mother failing to cope with the trauma of child bereavement. In most films, one would talk about the childhood scenes in terms of flashback, but Every Time I Die isn’t most films: it’s something very different. Which is not to say it’s 100% successful in its aims but rather as to applaud what it attempts to do, even if it doesn’t always succeed on all counts.
The acting is mostly adequate and ordinary where more gifted actors or perhaps stronger direction of them would have lifted the film to a much higher level. One could imagine it as a mind-bending Christopher Nolan epic, but it doesn’t quite possess that level of panache or style. The scene where someone struggles to escape from drowning in a car that’s driven into a lake lacks the tension Brian De Palma brought to such material in Blow Out (1981). And the shifts in reality compare poorly to those achieved by Gaspar Noé in Enter The Void (2010).
Where Every Time I Die really comes into its own though is when Sam starts waking up in the heads of one or another of the other characters and the narrative’s point of view shifts unexpectedly. Which is both highly unsettling and hugely effective. The editing of the piece by co-writer Gal Katzir is extraordinary: one wonders how many scenes were moved around during that process and to what extent it changed the shape of the final film. Either way, the juxtaposition of different sequences and the order in which they occur feels like a lot of work went in to that process, and it pays off, particularly as the film moves towards its increasingly unpredictable climax in the final half hour or so.
The film has been described as science fiction, which it really isn’t, and metaphysical, which it most definitely is. It asks enormous questions about existence, consciousness, life, death and beyond without ever resorting to obvious, clichéd answers. All of which is to its immense credit and suggests director Michael and his collaborators as talents to watch who might come up with something truly amazing in one or two movies time. We can but hope. In the meantime, while Every Time I Die may be heavily flawed it’s also a true original, which isn’t something that comes along very often. It’s never obvious where it’s going and as a thriller it will keep you guessing right up to the very end.
Every Time I Die is out on VoD from Monday, October 26th.
Trailer: