As genres go, sci-fi is a hard one to pull off on a low budget. Not as tough as historical drama maybe, but tough all the same. Someone Dies! is proof it can be done. Highly ingenious, it’s one of those no-fi movies where everyone has 12 jobs, a real sense of chaos prevails and there’s the constant impression that things could all fall apart at any minute.
Time travel is the sub-genre. And if the first questions you’d ask if you went time-travelling for real would be “Where am I?” and “Who are these people?”, that’s exactly what Justin Petty’s film does, and keeps doing, pretty much all the way to the finish.
I liked it, and liked it more as it went on and kept doubling down on its high concept. But then I also liked Jaron Henrie-McCrea’s Curtain, the 2015 sci-fi movie that was two people and a “time machine” fashioned from a plastic shower curtain. You have been warned.
The plot? Yes, that is something that only really becomes fully apparent in retrospect, when it becomes clear that time travel has indeed occurred. For the most part we are in an apartment where a detective (Joseph Graham) has turned up to investigate something. He’s dressed like a 1970s cop – all in brown – but he’s vaping and he has a bluetooth headset so who knows? Inside are two people who seem to be living together but claim not to know each other. Jane (Amy Anderson) just happens to be there, it turns out, to buy a seppuku sword – the Japanese ones used for ritual disembowelment – from Glenn (John Wessling), who has one for sale. Over the road, we’re told, lives a wizard (Anthony Obi) who can make garden furniture disappear. We’ll meet him down the road, dressed in a black cape covered in neon lights. But not before we’ve met Glenn’s Russian landlord, Ivan (Adam Edwards), who delivers the film’s musical interlude when Ivan goes into a rap routine. He’s not very good. Ivan the terrible, in fact.
Anyway, before long one of these people will have been cut in two by an accidental waste-disposal incident.
We are, I think (this film expects you to put in some work) in an alternate universe, one that’s 1970s flavoured but like our own apart from a rogue time-travel element. It occurs after what seems like a lot of disjointed toing and froing, but is a glitch so incidental it can easily be missed. Meanwhile, detective Jim investigates while fielding calls from an angry ex wife about their daughter, who is seemingly in peril. In fact that’s what he’s doing in this apartment, though to all intents and purposes the daughter seems fine. Maybe the danger she’s in hasn’t happened yet. The more I tell you, the less impact the film will have, so I’ll stop there.
The film’s big plus is that its main characters come across as normal (within bounds) human beings. These people are fallible. They have flavour. And though the actors playing them aren’t going to be showered with awards, the characters they portray are highly likeable, even Jim the flaky detective, and that counts for a lot.
The other big plus relates to that bit in a big-budget sci-fi movie where the consequences of time travel are dealt with in a neat bit of pseudo-scientific explanation. This movie does not do that. It does not insist that everything shakes out in the end, or that the human mind can really get itself around time-travel paradoxes. They’d drive you nuts, in fact, which is the overall tone of this film. Nuts. In a good way, and it keeps at it right to the very end.
Someone Dies! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
