‘Time Freak’s’ heart smarts
The “quirky-younglovers-obsessively-over-analyze-a-breakup” plot has been done to death in indie films, but writer-director Andrew Bowler adds a fun and surprisingly poignant science-fiction twist to “Time Freak,” a whimsical rom-com that’s a little bit “Hot Tub Time Machine” and a little bit “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Asa Butterfield plays an experimental physicist named Stillman, who has just been dumped by his girlfriend, Debbie (Sophie Turner), for reasons he can’t discern. So he comes up with a chart of their entire yearlong relationship and invents a time machine, so he can go back and tweak the moments where he thinks he blew it.
This kind of cutesy premise could have been insufferable if the characters’ troubles were too broadly comic or melodramatic. But Bowler keeps the conflict within the realm of the ordinary, mainly focusing on the times Stillman slightly overreacted: like when Debbie danced too closely with a mutual friend or when she laughed derisively at his favorite movie.
Stillman takes these trips into the recent past alongside his doofus pothead buddy Evan (Skyler Gisando), a character who starts out grating but becomes a useful foil, helping the hero understand when he ought to rewind and reset. The pair occasionally experiences glitches, getting stuck in days longer than they mean to and inadvertently discovering there’s more to “fixing” a life mistake than merely making one small change.
The ultimate point of “Time Freak” is that a healthy relationship demands more than micro-managing someone else’s happiness. The film sometimes tries too hard to drive that message home, though Butterfield and Turner play all their scenes in a low enough key that Bowler’s moralizing never becomes overbearing. (Turner has a tough role, as a woman who’s more of an idealized goal than a person, but the “Game of Thrones” star adds enough grace notes to make it work.)
Mostly, it’s impressive how Bowler reimagines his own Oscar-nominated 2011 short film.
He takes his original idea of using time-travel as a kind of metaphysical Photoshop and seriously thinks through how it would work — and whether it’s possible to have a “happy ending” when revision is always an option. “Time Freak.” Rated: PG-13, for drug material, some sexual content, and language. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes. Playing: AMC Universal CityWalk 19; also on VOD.