Review: The Infinite Man

Josh McConville stars as a guy who takes his love Hannah Marshall to the same motel they were at a year ago, to celebrate their anniversary and maybe put the spark back into things. Unfortunately, McConville didn’t do any research or book in advance, and they find the place is now abandoned. Whoops. This puts a dampener on his plans to recreate the exact experience of a year ago. Also complicating matters is Marshall’s former Olympian ex-boyfriend (Alex Dimitriades) who has followed them out there. And that’s when things all go to hell. A year later and McConville has apparently stayed at the motel the entire year perfecting a crude time machine so that he can travel back one year and have another crack at it, with a hopefully happier ending. Unfortunately, McConville just ends up complicating things and before long, he’s in a very weird situation where various versions of himself, Marshall, and even Dimitriades are running around the same space. Who knew relationships were so complicated?

 

Everybody raved over “Predestination” as the superior Aussie time-travel story of 2014, but I actually think this effort from writer-director Hugh Sullivan just edges it out (“Predestination” was good, but a disjointed film of two very distinct halves). Yes, it’s another time-travel film where a person interacts with several incarnations of themselves, but Sullivan is one of the rare few to find a way to make it work. You see, this is a very much contained story and world, it’s really only happening to three people, and if anything, it has more in common with “Groundhog Day” and its lead character’s attempts at finally getting it right (Or perhaps a low-budget “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”).

 

Josh McConville (an actor I’m unfamiliar with) is perfect in the lead. The character is a bit of a loser, but given what he’s trying to achieve here, it wouldn’t really work if he were George Clooney, would it? The surprise for me was Alex Dimitriades, not an actor I’m especially fond of, but his supposedly disgraced Olympic Javelin thrower is pretty hilarious, I have to say. The dud in the cast is leading lady Hannah Marshall, who is pretty wooden unfortunately, and it’s an important role. She doesn’t really help you see what’s so special about her that McConville would go to these lengths, though one wonders what she sees in such a loser as well, I guess. She also behaves inconsistently, I couldn’t understand why she was willing to go along with all of this in the first place if she had truly moved on with her life. And why does she never seem remotely surprised by anything? Because Marshall is a wooden actress, that’s why. Other than that, this is one wild and nutty film that gets wilder and nuttier as it goes along.

 

I really don’t think this film leaves any dead butterflies in its wake. It’s more a film about getting stuck in a loop than time-travel per se. Smart, funny, bizarre, and with a main character who is really kind of amusingly pathetic. If it had a better female lead, the film would’ve really been something. As is, I quite liked this one, it’s somewhat of a small film but very clever and interesting. A fine directorial debut by Sullivan, I’ll be interested to see what he comes up with next.

 

Rating: B-