National Post (National Edition)
Altered reality keeps you on toes
FILM REVIEW
Lifechanger Beware the title that promises too much. 30 Minutes or Less was almost 90 minutes long; The Lone Ranger had a sidekick in Johnny Depp; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter wasn’t even close to that; and Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby didn’t have any babies of any worth — not even a dime-store fake like in American Sniper.
Which brings us to Lifechanger, which is unlikely to change yours. But perhaps that’s not the point. Plenty of characters within this odd horror/romance hybrid see their lives changed mightily, often by having them ended.
We first meet Drew (Nicolas Cage sound-alike Bill Oberst Jr.) in voice-over only, because he doesn’t have a body to call his own. He’s a shape-shifter, and every time he shifts, he needs to kill the body whose shape he takes.
This was bad enough when a single change would keep him going for years, he explains, but lately his new body starts to decompose after just a few hours or days. And so for much of writer/director Justin McConnell’s film we watch as Drew becomes Emily, then Freddie (the detective unlucky enough to be investigating the whereabouts of the real Emily), then a dentist, then one of his hygienists, and so on.
Through it all, Drew keeps returning to the same local bar, where the joke is that there’s a neighbourhood dog that recognizes him no matter what he looks like. And he keeps running into Julia (Lora Burke), a chatty barfly and therapist with whom he seems to have some hidden history, or maybe just a deep crush.
Either way, it seems unlikely that anything will happen between Drew and Julia. Lifechanger is a little like the 2018 fantasy-romance Every Day, except in that story the protagonists were teenagers, and no one needed to die — “A” would just borrow someone’s body for 24 hours and then jump to a new one. Drew’s basically a serial killer, and has taken to dismembering and hiding and/or burning his previous bodies to keep police from noticing how many people are dropping dead around him.
Mcconnell is a Canadian filmmaker whose previous works include the documentary Skull World (about a hobby in which participants play-fight in cardboard costumes) and The Collapsed, a low-budget end-of-the-world thriller from 2011. I found both merely so-so, and I wish I could see more to love in his newest.
It’s well acted — in spite of the many performers playing Drew, we believe it’s the same guy on the inside — with a mix of gruesome and heartfelt moments that is certainly unique, if a little disconcerting. It also has a strange coda that’s not quite in keeping with the story we’ve been watching these last 80 minutes. What starts out as a horror and gradually morphs into a romantic drama ends on a very different note altogether.••½