‘Reversi’
“Time waits for no one,” Akid (Beto Kusyairy) says. Except for him, that is. He comes from a family in which people can travel back to the past. The mechanics are fuzzy but there are some basic rules, including the necessity to accept the inevitability of some events, no matter how much you try to prevent them, and the harsh reality that time travel takes years off your life, making you age faster. Those ground rules come into crucial play in Adrian Teh’s sci-fi melodrama, from Malaysia. Akid joins the police and marries Sarah (Shiqin Kamal), a martial-arts instructor; they have a child, Anas (Dzul Haziq or Danish Zamri, depending on Anas’s age). After tragedy hits the family, Akid tries to use his power to rewrite history.
Were this one of the many American films involving time manipulation, either through travel or loops, our hero would figure out a hack via repetition. Let’s just say that repetition in “Reversi” does not quite work out the way we’re used to, as the story is interested in a different set of moral and existential parameters. While the movie is, admittedly, a little overlong, Teh finds new gears at regular intervals, with a couple of plot twists that up the emotional ante.
‘The Last Spark of Hope’
After global warming and pollution have wrecked Earth, the rich and powerful have departed on starship arks for the interplanetary unknown — wandering in search of a livable planet somewhere in the cosmos is better than certain death at home. Eva (Magdalena Wieczorek) is still hanging on, living alone on a plateau above the toxic cloud that covers Earth. Well, almost alone: She has for company a military robot, Arthur (voiced by Jacek Beler), which stands guard over her compound — it even dutifully asks for a password when Eva returns from foraging expeditions. Then one day, Eva forgets the recently changed password and Arthur refuses to let her in, even though it knows very well who she is. She’s stuck, blocked from her shelter and supplies by what is, essentially, a bureaucrat stubbornly sticking to the rules.
The Polish writer-director Piotr Biedron manages to superimpose a framework of ecological devastation with the limitations and dangers of artificial intelligence. He makes the most of the single location, and stages Eva’s efforts to get back to her home base suspensefully. Since our heroine might well be the last woman on Earth, you might say the stakes are high.
‘The Gorge’
Let’s take a break from this month’s avalanche of bleak futures for some old-school pulp. Scott Derrickson (“The Black Phone,” “Sinister”) is among the better American directors working in genre these days, and with this movie he mixes two of them: sci-fi creature feature and romance — two great tastes that don’t often go together, let alone taste great together.
Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play the sharpshooters Levi and Drasa, who have been tasked with making sure whatever lurks at the bottom of the title gorge doesn’t escape. The two work for opposite sides of the geopolitical checkerboard and, appropriately, stand guard on opposite sides of the chasm. This does not prevent them from developing a delicious flirtation, even if we could have done without the meta references to the two stars’ most famous roles (let’s just say drumming and chess are involved). Aside from that, Derrickson keeps his foot down on the gas pedal, and Teller and Taylor-Joy’s playful chemistry should keep all but the most coherence-obsessed viewers distracted from the holes in the enjoyably wacky plot.
‘All the Lost Ones’
In a near tomorrow, a militia-like movement called the United Conservancy has taken over most of the Northeast, apparently straddling the United States and Canada. Those heavily armed, camo-wearing men espouse nationalism and racism, and the group claims to fight “for the freedom of its people.” Mackenzie Donaldson’s film, shot in Ontario, follows a small group of local residents desperately trying to evade the empowered thugs. They start holed up in a spacious house by a lake but soon must go on the move. “All the Lost Ones” was conceived before the current president of the United States started making noises about taking over his northern neighbor, but the recent saber-rattling has given this Canadian indie a different resonance. The movie’s low budget and simple plot actually reinforce its naturalism — the situation feels very real at times, especially as the leads are not freakishly skilled survivor types but regular folks who are not necessarily good at war games.
Fun side note: Donaldson cast her mother, the Canadian acting treasure Sheila McCarthy, as one of the people trying to evade the militia, further reinforcing the idea of scrappy Canucks standing up to force.
‘2073’
Here we go again — the mood is not sunny in science fiction these days. The United States of the year 2073 is a nightmare of extremes in this feature from the director Asif Kapadia. Cities have been leveled by fires while entire areas are flooded. Surveillance and authoritarianism keep people in check. In San Francisco, the country’s new capital, the rich live in blissful luxury in a mega-high rise. The rest survive however they can in an urban wasteland, like Ghost (Samantha Morton), who lives in the shoe department of a wrecked shopping mall.
What makes “2073” stand out is seeing how we got to this hypothetical future through nonfiction flashback segments (Kapadia is known for documentaries, including “Amy,” about Amy Winehouse, for which he won an Academy Award). The rise of authoritarianism and sectarianism around the world, the influence of gigantic corporations on the nooks and crannies of our lives, the destruction of the environment, the rise of big dog-eats-smaller dog “techno-libertariasnim” — unlike other dystopian movies, “2073” bluntly points out malfeasances and name names in our very real present. “People thought the world would end, but the world goes on,” Ghost says in her voice-over narration. “It’s us who will end.” This is a bleak, hopeless perspective, but Kapadia’s vision has the merit of being bracing.
