A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother.
Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning frantically busy films with a huge array of characters. Here, none of that. But Parallel isn’t just a calm corrective to an exhausting genre but also a smart drama that stands up on its own terms.
Instead of busy, here we have a film that’s cool, almost static at times, wordy, contemplative. Set in a chichi modern lake house, it focuses almost entirely on Vanessa and Alex, a couple with hurt in their lives. They are recovering from the death of their young son. Vanessa won’t hear the little boy’s name mentioned. Alex wonders if his relationship with his wife is dead too. Alex’s brother Martel is stuck in the middle, looking helplessly on.
Then one day Vanessa goes for a walk in the woods to clear her head. There are bears, it’s said, so she takes a rifle, and there are also odd rumours about experiments that used to take place in a long-abandoned facility. And here’s where the film proper starts, with Vanessa catching sight of herself, or a version of herself, dressed like her and carrying a rifle, which is soon loosing off bullets in her direction. Rushing home, she tells no one. Why? Because a seed has been planted. If the other Vanessa is a traveller from an alternate version of this world, then there’s a possibility that there are also other versions of Alex out there, and Martel. Possibly, just possibly, there’s an alternate reality where her son is still alive?
With no special effects to speak of, the three actors do it all the old way, using acting to separate out the various, subtly different iterations of Alex, Vanessa and Martel who will eventually flit across the screen as not very much happens in a highly consequential way.
The cast is black, which isn’t that remarkable in itself, except that sci-fi is usually a white guy genre, Aldis and brother Edwin Hodge and Danielle Deadwyler. Nor is it so remarkable that black people might have a lake house, though in movies that’s also unusual. The Hodge brothers also wrote the screenplay, which is an adaptation of a Chinese film, Parallel Forest.
Almost the only criticism you can make of the film is that the Hodges had every chance to write dialogue they themselves would be comfortable speaking. And yet, in early scenes in particular, both struggle with the reams of therapy-speak their characters have to get off their chests, for our benefit rather than theirs.
It’s a small quibble because once Parallel has got its set-up established, it moves its players around like chess pieces. Though there must be multiple versions of Alex, Vanessa and Martel out there, we never meet more than two at a time, so it’s easy (ish) to keep a handle on who is who and which is which. Or is it? A game of chase the lady might be in play, subterraneanly.
Of course you could argue that it’s not a multiverse movie at all and is instead a drama about a married couple torn apart – into separate selves – by the death of a child.
Director Kourosh Ahari also did the high-concept Iranian horror story The Night (well worth checking out) but is determined to maintain the “this is sci-fi” branding, and along with his excellent DP Pip White shoots everything as pin sharp and almost unnaturally clear as digital cinematography can manage. The two of them have taken their cue from the pristine looks of the Chinese original, but they also throw in some excellent old-school homages to Fritz Lang in the way the elegantly swooping camera does some of the dramatic work.
Josh Atchley and Denise Santos wrote the music, which also insists on sci-fi when what’s in front of us has none of its usual trappings – no tech, no mumbo-jumbo.
There is more that can be said but that would dispel some of this film’s excellently conjured mood. I see from the IMDb that this quietly excellent film has a painfully low rating. The wisdom of crowds, eh? For what it’s worth I think it’s more than pretty good, and just edges the Chinese original.
Parallel – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
