Too Many Copies

I often review films and franchises that are popular, the works that grab attention and get people online talking. Whatever big blockbuster is out (or, at least, out on streaming) or the failed sequel that flops so hard everyone has to point and laugh. But I do like to delve deeper into the archives of various streaming services, and I keep an eye out for anything that comes along that sounds interesting, even if no one else has been really talking about it. Sometimes you can find a gem hidden in the back catalogs, and if that movie is worthy enough, perhaps attention can be brought and more people will start chatting about it. That’s the hope anyway.

Of course there’s also a downside to this: sometimes you find a film or show that sounds truly promising, but once you get into it the execution just isn’t there. You want to like it, hope it’ll be good, but something about it all just feels off and, in the end, it doesn’t rise up the way you’d hope. Such was the case with Multiverse, a 2019 Canadian independent film that seems like the right kind of movie to review for this site. People creating a machine that can bridge the multiverse sounds awesome. Sadly, when it comes to execution, not everything is good as it could have been.

The film starts promisingly enough. A group of college students are experimenting in their on-campus lab with possible quantum entanglement and spooky motion. The thought is that if they can find a way to control and use the quantum motion correctly, they could actually push beyond the barriers of this world and maybe bridge through the multiverse to other universes, parallel worlds not that different from our own. Realizing that water works as a good medium for quantum entanglement, the crew loads up their gear into a car and drives off to the local reservoir and, on the drive, they get the evidence they need.

Sadly, during the drive they nearly get into a car accident, sending another vehicle off a ridge, balancing on the edge of a cliff. One of the crew, Loretta (Paloma Kwiatkowski), goes to check on the other vehicle, but when it falls off the cliff she gets pulled down with them to her death. The rest of the crew of friends – Munro Chambers as Gerry, Robert Naylor as Danny, and Sandra Mae Frank as Amy – are left devastated and they abandon the project out of respect for Loretta. But months later, Danny (who was formerly Loretta’s boyfriend) thinks he sees Loretta wandering around campus, and this leads all of them to wonder about whether the multiverse was real and if, somehow, some Loretta has managed to cross over…

For a small budget film, I have to credit Multiverse for having real ambitions. The film wants to find a way to tell an interesting, intriguing sci-fi story wrapped up in a thriller plotline, and it certainly tries for it. The whole setup is interesting, with the crew figuring a way to detect other worlds only to then find out months later that some other versions of themselves actually managed to pull it off, and the film is smart about how it sets things up. The film wants to suck you in with this tale of crossed worlds and intrigue, and I do respect what it’s trying to do.

Unfortunately execution is a big problem for this film in a number of ways. First and foremost, because of the needs of the budget, we only ever spend time on one world, the “prime” reality. Part of the fun of multiversal stories is seeing what’s the same and what’s different between worlds. This film, though, only sticks to the prime reality and never really gives us a taste of what the other side could be like. Hell, the whole setup tries to emphasize that, “only if two worlds are really closely related can people crossover,” implying that aside from really tiny changes the two worlds are so close and the same that even visiting the other world would be pointless. That kind of sucks the fun out of things.

At the same time, the film also betrays this setup pretty quickly. Two of the four members of the team that cross over from the other world, Gerry and Amy, are actually pretty different from their counterparts. Other-Gerry is a psychopath, one that needs prescription drugs to regulate his emotions and keep himself in check, while Prime-Gerry isn’t. You would think this would cause some pretty significant changes in his history, background, and overall composition but, no, he still fills the same space, acts mostly the same (at least until his drugs wear off) and slots neatly in as a Gerry for a while. This feels off, like it shouldn’t work that way.

Arguably for Amy the change is even more significant. In the prime reality Amy is deaf (credit where it’s due, she’s played by deaf actress Sandra Mae Frank) but in the other world she’s not. Supposedly this is because there was a ninety percent chance she could be born deaf but Other-Amy won the dice roll. Because of that, Other-Amy had a bad relationship with her mother and ended up growing up very different… except she still slots right into the group as expected, with all the same basic behaviors and past history. Considering Other-Amy wouldn’t have gone to a deaf school and wouldn’t have had the same life experiences, shouldn’t she be a very different person?

I get the idea of writing these changes into these characters as a way to illustrate the shifting of the multiverse. These are intriguing ideas that would make for an interesting exploration of the multiverse, especially over a long time period with these characters. I could imagine a show like Sliders featuring a deaf character and then, as they travel between worlds, certain worlds have a version of her that isn’t deaf to add contrast to her character. Then we could explore what it would have been like for her to go in a different direction due to this major shift. Multiverse can’t do that because that would change her character too much, though, and it really feels like it betrays its whole concept in ways the film can’t account for.

The film also introduces a very strange idea as well: two versions of the same person cannot exist in the same world for too long. This is because of quantum entanglement and life energies or something. It’s all brought up as if the science is sound, but it’s really not very scientific at all. All it really leads to is a discussion about who should live or die and if murdering your own clone is justified. This would, again, be an intriguing idea if it were raised by anyone other than the psychopathic Other-Gerry, and it’s pretty clear the film creates Other-Gerry so he can be a villain and keep the plot moving. It’s efficient, yes, but also too efficient. He’s a cheating shortcut the film makes so it can end-run its own story.

This doesn’t even get into the biggest issue I had with the film (and spoilers for a five year old movie you probably hadn’t heard about before now), the ending. The film leads up to the various members bumping off their alternates or watching their alternates commit suicide all so we have a composite group of our core four. Then they go for a drive along the reservoir and, suddenly, there’s a car accident and our core group ends up being the ones sitting on the edge of the cliff, watching their inevitable fall as a version of Loretta comes up to check on them. Is it quantum entanglement and we’re in another universe? Is it a time loop and we’re back where we started? The film doesn’t say and, honestly, neither answer is really satisfying. The film clearly wants you to think it’s either, or both, so it can get a “twisty” shock ending, but what it really does is both betray its own concept while also saying that everything we just watched doesn’t matter. Why care about these characters when they’re all going to die?

However you look at it, Multiverse is a film with grand ambitions that really can’t pull itself together. It has an interesting idea for a story and a good hook to get you into the movie, but then it constantly betrays its own setup and fails to give its characters the proper exploration and meaning they deserve. It’s a film on the cusp of being really good but, because of a few small decisions, ends up becoming very, very bad. I wanted to like this film, but the best I can do is call it a noble failure.