Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Movie Review: "Anti Matter" (2017)

Director: Keir Burrows
Year: 2017
Rating: NR
Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

A research scientist invents a stable wormhole capable of transporting matter over any distance instantly. After going through on her own, however, she comes out having troubles with her memory and now has to figure out what went wrong.

We love sci-fi films, whether they be "hard sci-fi," ones that try to be as plausible as possible, or "soft sci-fi fantasy" flicks, ones that have aliens battling it out in a space adventure. "Anti Matter" mostly lands in the hard sci-fi category. It valiantly tries to make what the characters are doing at least sound possible, even if it is a total fantasy in reality. It's a story that throws out a lot of science jargon and a little exposition to help explain where the characters are coming from and what we should understand about what the characters are saying. That being said, writer/director Keir Burrows uses this sci-fi premise to have a bit of an underlying philosophical discussion about personhood and what could be seen as a metaphorical representation of real life conditions such as Alzheimer disease and dementia.

The film stars Yaiza Figueroa as Ana, a Mexican-American scientist who seems to have stumbled on the discovery of the century. With the help of her partners Nate, played by Tom Barber-Duffy, and Liv, played by Philippa Carson, they are able to make a machine capable of creating stable wormholes. In a rush to get funding, they want to prove their machine works and is completely safe, so Ana decides to test it on herself. She goes through the wormhole and everything seems fine at first, but when she wakes up, she realizes she can't remember anything since the experiment. She is also unable to create new memories. Now, Ana is on a quest to find out what went wrong and what is happening to her.

We have seen a lot of low budget independent movies, and once in a while, one stands out from the crowd as something interesting and worthwhile. "Anti Matter" is one of those films. The story is very engaging and manages to keep the audience invested in its characters. We found ourselves wanting to find out what happened to Ana and we got more and more intrigued along the way. There are several moments of tension and thrills as we see a confused woman with no memory trying to unravel the mystery of what happened during her experiment gone-right-but-gone-wrong. It can be said this movie has the memory loss mystery seen in "Memento" added to the paranoia of "Pi." We won't go as far as claiming this film is perfect or flaw-free, but it is still pretty good.

There are some who may claim that Keir Burrows is trying a little too hard to be clever in his subject matter. Some may wonder why Ana's friends are so flippant towards her and are never willing to help her more and explain everything that happened to her in full detail. For those who have had a person with dementia or Alzheimer's in their lives, what we see in "Anti Matter" is exactly how it can be to have the same conversation with someone five times a day as a person asks the same questions over and over from being stricken with those illnesses. We can try our best to have these discussions over and over, but it does get frustrating to explain something to a person who will forget everything you said in a very short while. We feel Barber-Duffy and Carson capture this frustration quite well, and Figueroa does a great job conveying the confusion from the other side of the equation.

This movie is a bit of a mystery, but we will admit, we did see the big reveal coming from a mile away. Even though we figured out where it was all headed early on in its run time, "Anti Matter" still has an enjoyable road to get to its finale. It asks some interesting questions and is mostly well acted.
My Rating: 6.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 7/10
IMDB's Rating: ~7.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ~87%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure why not?

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