Director: Isaac Ezban
100 minutes (15) 2018
101 Films DVD
Rating: 7/10
Review by Steven Hampton
Reminiscent of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), this Canadian thriller has young techies discover a secret room with a kind of magic mirror that’s a dimensional portal to a multi-verse of possibilities and career opportunities. The kids develop their unfair advantage by exploiting differing clock-speeds in some mirror-world timelines. From stolen inventions to copied artwork, creative industries are a potential goldmine, but is theft from alternate worlds just a victimless crime? The childish indulgence of blowing up $1 million sounds like fun, until creepy doppelganger antics result in sudden death.
Like a next-gen version of TV show Sliders (1995 - 2000), Mexican director Isaac Ezban’s Parallel is perhaps the best wonderfully witty sci-fi movie since Looper (2012). It brings out dark paranoia in the protagonists that ramps higher with every new level of deception folded sideways into their original reality. Somewhat unavoidably, determination soon becomes obsession when emerging characters develop complicated ambitions into money-spinning solutions to problems and needs that didn’t exist before. It cleverly fulfils a precept of all the best SF about extrapolation of any fantastic idea to its logical conclusion. Intelligent sci-fi does not have to be a confusingly intellectual puzzle. Parallel is instantly engaging, like a heist-movie with a moral dilemma, and it succeeds at being hugely entertaining without ever losing its appeal to fans of Twilight Zone-style mysteries.
“I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me.” Oh yes - it’s just not possible to avoid such dialogue in a movie that makes unreasonable demands on the viewer’s sense of ironic humour. Made in 2018, Parallel might have been overlooked for an international release until now because it lacks any Hollywood star names, although Kathleen Quinlan appears briefly, in a prologue sequence. It could be this year’s re-watchable Tenet on DVD. Look out for the strange mirror’s final and weirdly fatal tilt. It’s gruesomely slippery when wet.
