Timeless Love (2019)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) I remain amazed at how Hallmark movies can be counted upon to completely neuter the most provocative premises by smothering them in mountains of romantic unctuousness. I shouldn’t be so surprised: after all, their goal is to offer comforting viewing to viewers who are looking for familiarity. What if an urban professional loses everything, moves back to her small town to live with her parents, and regresses to her teenage years by hooking up with her past flame? That’s called a romantic good time by the audience of those movies. Still, there are limits to what I thought was possible by the form, and Timeless Love exceeds a good number of them. I never would have expected that good old horror/Twilight-Zone/creepypasta chestnut about dreaming a perfect life and then waking up to be used as kernel for a romantic comedy, but here we are. As the film begins, our protagonist wakes up from a coma in which she has imagined, in intricate detail, a perfect life as an author with her hunk of a husband and two kids. Woken up, however, she’s a single, jobless woman with dim prospects. Shrugging off the entire thing as an unusually vivid hallucination is unpleasant but possible… until her job search brings her in contact with none other than her coma-time husband, a sexy single hunk about whom she knows many, many things. You know how it’s going to end and that’s the point of it. Never mind the wibbly-wobbly coma/reality thing, because director Brian Brough is far more interested in going through the usual motions of a romantic comedy, overwriting the initial horror of the situation by smothering it with early-relationship clichés all the way to the revelation and the denouement realizing the comatic prophecy. As an exercise in defanging a potent meme, Timeless Love is far more interesting in the abstract than in the details (acting, direction, cinematography are generally transparent), although it does remain as watchable as most other Hallmark movies are. In between this and other Hallmark forays into Science Fiction (including a few time-loop romances), there would almost be an interesting article to write about the intersection of daytime romance and SF.