There are serious spoilers below.
Any sort of storytelling is about engagement, and one of the most interesting engagement strategies is the "puzzle" story. This comes in several varieties, starting with the detective story which plainly presents you with a mystery and a surrogate in the story with whom you presumably collaborate. At the other end are the surprise puzzles that present you with information at the end that makes you re-evaluate what you knew: "Sixth Sense," "Usual Suspects."
The ones that are the most fun are the ones whose puzzles are a serious challenge and which don't wrap up cleanly at the end. "Memento" and "Fight Club" were great fun, because you carried the narrative around for days afterward and because it was purely cinematic, you essentially *lived* in the movie, overlain on your own world.
Then there's the subclass of cinematic narrative within that group. Here's where you have a puzzle with several solutions. Naturally the simplest one is the one usually considered "true." But it leaves some loose ends that are considered mistakes, or merely superfluous. But a non-novice puzzle-solver can see the deeper solution.
"Irreversible," "Identity," and "Primer" are examples of this. And this film is another.
The story is that a young man awakens in a hospital in 2002. He discovers he was there also on that day in 2000 the victim of an accident, and he cannot recall the intervening two years. The two periods overlap. There are threats and two women that appear and disappear.
The novice solution is that he, his brother and a shared woman got involved in a happenstance that ended in them all dying in a car accident in 2000. (This setup and accident, incidentally are prototypically noir. So the movie invokes a movie with unreal characteristics instead of real.) Our hero dies for two minutes, is resuscitated and dies again immediately. The solution is that all we have seen is the two minutes in his mind envisioned as two years, and him trying to come to terms with the noir mechanics of the accident that killed his brother.
A more advanced solution is that he was resuscitated and remained in a coma for two years. We are introduced to a character who has been waiting for a heart transplant. In 2002, when our waking hero visits this guy, he sees a comatose patient in the same room. That is he, ready to donate his heart. We then see our hero "kill" this recipient patient by stabbing in the heart, both in 2000 and 2002. Our hero finds himself on an elevator with an orderly and a covered body (the recipient) and the orderly says "this never happens."
So a more advanced solution is that the two years is spent in constantly revisiting and reliving the movie inside during the two years of coma. When the transplant actually happens, our hero sabotages it to put himself out of misery.
An even more advanced solution is the one I prefer. For background, you need to know some tradition about the untrusted narrator. Usually, you know who the narrator is, but later you discover that they cannot be trusted. "The Others" is a good example. What's much more interesting is when you discover not only that the narrator cannot be trusted, but neither can your knowledge of who that narrator is. The advanced solutions to "Identity" and "Primer" are of this type.
So its cool if you consider this other solution. Our hero in fact died in the accident. When he visits the morgue, there are three bodies there. His heart went to the recipient we know, and has prompted two years of haunting in that body and mind. So the narrator whose visions we see are in fact the guy with the new heart. Shades of "Return to Me."
In this case, when we see our hero strapped in an MRI machine, it is actually the heart recipient (Travitt, who blurs with the orderly Travis who tells our guy he will take him on a journey). And that guy is threatened by a masked man who actually is our hero, Simon.
I prefer this solution. You might as well. Oh, and it has Sarah Polley as the cause of the whole disaster.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Any sort of storytelling is about engagement, and one of the most interesting engagement strategies is the "puzzle" story. This comes in several varieties, starting with the detective story which plainly presents you with a mystery and a surrogate in the story with whom you presumably collaborate. At the other end are the surprise puzzles that present you with information at the end that makes you re-evaluate what you knew: "Sixth Sense," "Usual Suspects."
The ones that are the most fun are the ones whose puzzles are a serious challenge and which don't wrap up cleanly at the end. "Memento" and "Fight Club" were great fun, because you carried the narrative around for days afterward and because it was purely cinematic, you essentially *lived* in the movie, overlain on your own world.
Then there's the subclass of cinematic narrative within that group. Here's where you have a puzzle with several solutions. Naturally the simplest one is the one usually considered "true." But it leaves some loose ends that are considered mistakes, or merely superfluous. But a non-novice puzzle-solver can see the deeper solution.
"Irreversible," "Identity," and "Primer" are examples of this. And this film is another.
The story is that a young man awakens in a hospital in 2002. He discovers he was there also on that day in 2000 the victim of an accident, and he cannot recall the intervening two years. The two periods overlap. There are threats and two women that appear and disappear.
The novice solution is that he, his brother and a shared woman got involved in a happenstance that ended in them all dying in a car accident in 2000. (This setup and accident, incidentally are prototypically noir. So the movie invokes a movie with unreal characteristics instead of real.) Our hero dies for two minutes, is resuscitated and dies again immediately. The solution is that all we have seen is the two minutes in his mind envisioned as two years, and him trying to come to terms with the noir mechanics of the accident that killed his brother.
A more advanced solution is that he was resuscitated and remained in a coma for two years. We are introduced to a character who has been waiting for a heart transplant. In 2002, when our waking hero visits this guy, he sees a comatose patient in the same room. That is he, ready to donate his heart. We then see our hero "kill" this recipient patient by stabbing in the heart, both in 2000 and 2002. Our hero finds himself on an elevator with an orderly and a covered body (the recipient) and the orderly says "this never happens."
So a more advanced solution is that the two years is spent in constantly revisiting and reliving the movie inside during the two years of coma. When the transplant actually happens, our hero sabotages it to put himself out of misery.
An even more advanced solution is the one I prefer. For background, you need to know some tradition about the untrusted narrator. Usually, you know who the narrator is, but later you discover that they cannot be trusted. "The Others" is a good example. What's much more interesting is when you discover not only that the narrator cannot be trusted, but neither can your knowledge of who that narrator is. The advanced solutions to "Identity" and "Primer" are of this type.
So its cool if you consider this other solution. Our hero in fact died in the accident. When he visits the morgue, there are three bodies there. His heart went to the recipient we know, and has prompted two years of haunting in that body and mind. So the narrator whose visions we see are in fact the guy with the new heart. Shades of "Return to Me."
In this case, when we see our hero strapped in an MRI machine, it is actually the heart recipient (Travitt, who blurs with the orderly Travis who tells our guy he will take him on a journey). And that guy is threatened by a masked man who actually is our hero, Simon.
I prefer this solution. You might as well. Oh, and it has Sarah Polley as the cause of the whole disaster.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.