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I’ll Follow You Down
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Well Go USA Review written by and copyright: Ethan Stevenson (10th August 2014). |
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The Film
 “I’m going to make sure this doesn't happen to us again.” A couple of years ago—like, say, when this independent Canadian production was shot, in the early part of 2013—the perfect combination of title and cast would’ve allowed for some rather bitter, biting puns in a review of “I’ll Follow You Down”. Perhaps some sort of play on how the title and turn-back plot fit both the middling direct-to-video time-travel tale and trajectories of its stars: Haley Joel Osment, Gillian Anderson, Victor Garber, and Rufus Sewell—all once promising, even outright successful actors, whose careers came apart in the middle of the last decade; their star power sucked into a black wormhole of B and C-list productions, and each probably wishing they could go back and do things differently. And yet, in the year and a half since “Down” was put in the can, Anderson’s back on television, leading her own procedural in “The Fall” (2013-present) and frequently guesting as the titular character’s complacent therapist in Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal” (2013-present). Osment has landed plush roles on “television” too, notably in Amazon Studio’s “Alpha House” (2013-present), and has several upcoming films with a least modest prestige, from Kevin Smith’s “Tusk” (2014) to a mysterious project from Max Landis called “Me Him Her” (2015). Even the incredibly underrated Sewell, usually a supporting actor and occasionally even the baddie in a number of films and series over the years, usually relegated to European television of recent, looks to be re-teaming on a big-screen project with Alex Proyas, whose “Dark City” (1998) was the closest thing to a mainstream Hollywood leading man part the actor has ever had. If even half of their new and upcoming television shows and films turn out to be decent, I’m afraid the cast—well, no, happy, because I happen to like most of the actors a great deal as performers—will be going up from here; “Down” will be the lowest point of their careers for at least for a while. And honestly, writer/director Richie Mehta’s “I'll Follow You Down” isn't even that bad; not exactly the nadir of narrative filmmaking. It’s just too thematically and technically ambitious for its budget, and totally lacking in style or structural innovation to make it stand out from any number of better films even flimsily focused around time-travel. Then again, calling this film a time-travel tale is not wholly honest. This isn’t the movie the marketing and press materials, box summaries or trailers suggest it is: A timeline shifting sci-fi thriller. I made the mistake of watching the trailer on this disc before watching the film, and I’m afraid it might have distorted expectations for what I was about to watch—so much so that my initial viewing was a frustrating cast of constantly adjusting those expectations as I watched what was really happening on screen unfold. Although time travel features at the fringes of “Follow’s” frames, almost like a constant, the film is more directly a drama, concerned with the evolution of character relationships over time. It’s about trying to forget history; yet also about how our past drives our possible futures. All the while, the film’s central characters spend most of their screen time theorizing about traveling backward in time rather than actually doing it. Haley Joel Osment plays Erol, a bright college student with an interest in the quantum mechanics of wormholes, particularly how they could work as portals to the past. Erol has a reason for his interest in the possibilities of time-jumping through history, as his own childhood was complicated by a rather traumatic event. Erol’s father, Gabe (Rufus Sewell), disappeared on a business trip to New Jersey, when Erol was 7 years old. The sudden disappearance wrecked Erol’s mother, Marika (Gillian Anderson, giving it her all as a pill-popping, therapist-hating, emotionally-codependent bipolar manic depressive), who eventually convinced herself that Gabe—a once-doting dad and thought-honorable husband—left them for another woman. Perhaps even another family. Erol’s grandfather, Sal (the always reliable Victor Garber), was also deeply affected, and for years harbored horrible guilt, having felt responsible for the family-damaging turn of events, because the day Gabe disappeared her was visiting Princeton, where Sal was a tenured professor at the time. They were supposed to meet for lunch but never did. As time goes on, moving linearly from the early 2000's, when Gabe never came home, to the here and now some 15 years later, grandfather and grandson learn, by way of an obsessive investigation into Gabe’s true reason for being at the university, that the strange circumstances surrounding his disappearance may point to real, not just theoretical, time travel. With Erol’s help, Sal spends years pouring over pages and pages of random, ridiculously bizarre notes and other detritus left in the peculiar temporal wake of Gabe’s sudden departure. Papers relating to Albert Einstein suggest he chose the late 1940's as his destination; they eventually pinpoint the likely date to sometime in 1946. But the more Sal and Erol search in the archives for signs of Gabe in the past, they find nothing, save for one minor newspaper clipping about a mysterious dead man shot in the back. Convinced that Gabe must have been murdered—but for what reason?—before he could return to the present, the deducing duo decide to reverse engineer his experiment and travel back to save him. For the first hour or so of “I’ll Follow You Down”, Erol and Sal debate, in long-winded scenes filled with line after line of rapid-fire technobabble and sorta-sounds-plausible pseudo-science, not only how traveling through time could be possible in theory, but what the moral implications and ramifications of actually doing so in practice could be to not just themselves but everyone. For a film ostensibly interested in time travel—the third act finally sees the travel in question, although with visual effects no more elaborate than a flash of light—there’s very little actual time traveling on screen. The final moments of the film briefly send Erol to a warehouse, diner, and street corner, and back to the warehouse respectively, for a few scenes in 1946, where mostly more talking occurs. On the one hand, as the production’s minimal budget probably didn’t allow for more than a few period touches like suits and hats, a couple of cars, and sparsely appointed diner and warehouse sets, I suppose it’s a good thing the film spends so little in anywhere other than the present or immediate past, where little, beyond minor upgrades in technology, has changed (props to the production crew for actually digging out a Powerbook running OS 9; that’s more detail for a 2000-set feature than I expected). Mehta’s narrative spends most of its time in forward momentum, as Erol grows from a boy into a young man. Osment’s older Erol shows up at about the twenty minute mark, looking like he hasn’t shaved in a couple of weeks, or showered in a decade. He’s a far ways away from Cole Sear, that’s for certain. Amidst all the talk of time travel and attempts at correcting past mistakes, he’s more immediately interested in living his life rather than re-living it, embarking on a relationship with his childhood sweetheart (Susanna Fournier), fumbling through relationship trials: their first fight over his late night lectures on time travel with grandpa, and his wacko mother; moving in together; buying their first house; and even having their first child. But as Erol attempts to move on, move forward with his life, his past keeps tugging at him—and it almost seems as though fate intends to intervene. Suicides, miscarriages, and other terrible things send Erol’s very existence tumbling continually toward the melodramatic, and each mounting event ultimately culminates in his own timeline altering trip into the past, not just to save his father, but to undo so many of the mistakes and miserable mishaps Erol himself has faced since dear dad’s disappearance. Although there’s a major twist thrown out in the final act of “I’ll Follow You Down”, it has little—although not noting—to do with dead people. The twist isn’t specifically related to time paradoxes, or the dangers of coming into conflict with one’s former self in the past as often takes up so many the long winded dialogues between Erol and his grandfather—a staple of almost any other time travel tale set in one’s own lifetime. The twist, beyond the several expectation dashing diversions away from the time-shifting plot element, usually towards character drama—which honestly seem less like genuine originality and more a necessity to continue the within the budget—is in the rushed third act, which reunites father and son for too brief a time. After an hour of theory, a lot of talk unfolding at a languid pace, the actual application of tunnelling through worm holes into another time is a blink and miss it event, and the confrontation between Erol and Gabe perhaps too neatly tied up just as quickly. Although the production is supported by solid performances, and the film has some interesting ideas at its core, few things about “I’ll Follow You Down” are fresh, and more often the script is too thematically ambitious for the budget. Debatably, the project seems too daunting for its writer/director, who proves capable of working with his actors, and has a workmanlike style that suggests a visual simplicity, but he’s inexperienced elsewhere, especially in handling the complexities of the very fabric of time and space.
Video
In a way, “I’ll Follow You Down” seems like a bit of an ascetic throwback, and viewing it feels a bit like trip in a time machine, too; the dial presumably set to some time before the proliferation of digital color-timing. Although shot digitally, with one significant exception, Mehta and cinematographer Tico Poulakakis’ bleak soft platte—with very effective splashes of bright, bolder hues—comes across largely through the deliberately sparse set decoration and naturalistic lighting, rather than overzealous tweaking through the film’s digital intermediate. Their resulting image has solid contrast, with inky blacks, and the picture is at times staggeringly sharp with rich detail and relatively natural textures. Skin tones are warm and lifelike; never flushed or drained by tinkering with tint. The one exception to the natural, un-manipulated, style is of course in the third act, set in 1946. There, in the final moments, Mehta and Poulakakis have taken a page from Robert Richardson and Martin Scorcese’s work on “The Aviator” (2004), and boosted and shifted the colors in the artificial direction, recreating contemporary cinema, particularly the supersaturated vibrancy of 3-strip Technicolor photography. The Blu-ray handles the film fine on either front; aside from the various vanity reels in the opening title, several of which suffer from severe although likely inherent banding, Well Go USA’s 2.40:1 widescreen 1080p 24/fps high definition AVC MPEG-4 encoded transfer is excellent, and shows no signs of edge enhancement, noise reduction, compression artifacts or encoding anomalies.
Audio
The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack has no real action to amp it up; only one gun shot. The film is quiet, driven by dialogue, long-winded monologues and rapid philosophical debate rather than rousing, bass-heavy action. Even the few fights between characters, or chaotic break downs, take place in confined spaces like classrooms and apartments and are muted. Subtle atmosphere does creep into the surrounds on occasion, specifically in a lengthy sequence in which Erol tracks his father through the suburbs of Princeton, New Jersey on a relatively busy day. Chatter from passing pedestrians, cars, and rustling leaves in the wind all add a believable element. Although bass is lacking, the track has excellent clarity, especially noticeable in the rich classical tones of Andrew Lockington orchestral score. The disc also includes an English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track and optional English subtitles.
Extras
“I’ll Follow You Down” includes a featurette, deleted scenes, the film’s original theatrical trailer, and a few bonus trailers that play before the main menu. Note: a weird authoring glitch queues up the rest of the extras when any one option is selected. The deleted scenes auto play after the featurette, the trailer, and so on. The generically titled “Behind the Scenes” (2.40:1/1.78:1 widescreen, 1080p; 12 minutes 47 seconds) featurette is actually an interesting look at the film’s music, featuring excerpts from the scoring sessions and interviews with writer/director Richie Mehta and composer Andrew Lockington. Three deleted scenes (2.40:1 widescreen, 1080p) are also included: - “Marika Painting Scene” (1 minute 35 seconds) is a slightly different, longer, post-title opening that alludes to the time travel and wormhole elements earlier with the gift of a painting that doesn’t otherwise feature in the film. - “Mrs. Moore’s Introduction” (53 seconds) is a scene with Sal’s secretary, which is another deletion that would’ve clued in on an earlier, if ultimately abandoned, subplot. - “Grace Cooks Dinner” (1 minutes 44 seconds) shows an uncomfortable dinner with Erol’s girlfriend in which he tries to explain the work he’s doing with his grandfather. The disc also includes the original theatrical trailer (2.40:1 widescreen, 1080p; 2 minutes 5 seconds) for “I’ll Follow You Down” that makes the film look more like an intense thriller than a character drama with a sci-fi element. Pre-menu bonus trailers are for: - “Very Good Girls” (2.40:1 widescreen, 1080p; 1 minute 44 seconds). - “Kid Cannabis” (1.78:1 widescreen, 1080p; 2 minutes 5 seconds). - “McCanick” (2.40:1 widescreen, 1080p; 1 minute 44 seconds).
Packaging
Well Go USA packages “I’ll Follow You Down” in a Vortex keep case. The single layered BD-25 is locked to Region A.
Overall
I’m a sucker for a good sci-fi story about time travel, which “I’ll Follow You Down” sort of is, but only in fits and starts. Well acted, and initially intriguing, the film is ultimately too ambitious for a its budget, relatively inexperienced writer/director, or both. It's also not the film the trailer or other marketing materials suggest. Frankly, “Down” is a bit of a disappointment, if only because it never realizes the potential of its premise or cast, wasting a twisting tale that offers some surprise by ending in anti-climax and relishing in well-worn genre tropes at even expectedly unexpected turn. A little tweaking, perhaps some truly riveting stylistic or structural innovation, could easily make this a much better film within its scale, but in the end the ultimate result is a film that is unlike many genre entries until the exact moment it's forced to hastily conclude in a way seen a dozen times before. At least the Blu-ray offers excellent video and satisfying audio; extras are thin.
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