Gaurav Seth

(On Cable TV, February 2020) There are at least two low-budget 2019 films called Entangled—this one is the Canadian Science Fiction thriller featuring four students of “anomalous science” who end up creating a strange quantum entanglement phenomenon that eventually comes to haunt them after an untimely death. Obviously shot in Sudbury (which is quickly emerging as a Canadian Science Fiction film powerhouse—I’m coining Sudburypunk right now), it’s a low-budget, small-cast, limited-scope kind of science fiction film, rather charming in dealing with its own limitations. The film’s colour palette most often seems to be shades of dour blue, which applies to the plot as well: Our amateur mad scientists are not all sane, and when strange events (which we quickly deduct to be parallel universe doppelgangers) start happening, it’s clear that they’re not all going to react rationally. This is probably the weakest part of the story—there was quite enough here in the premise without throwing in a human antagonist as well, but that’s how the script goes. Entangled does a bit better on the execution front—the cinematography reinforces its themes of duplication by making heavy use of mirrors. I’m paying attention to director Gaurav Seth: After the rather good Prisoner X and now Entangled, he seems to be emerging as a significant talent for Canadian genre cinema. Marlee Matlin shows up in a small role as the mother of one character, with her deafness weaved into the story. I’m not entirely happy with the ending that feels both obvious in some ways and willfully obtuse in others, but the result is more interesting than most movies in the Science Fiction genre these days, and I’m not going to be overly critical of a low-budget Canadian feature shot in my area of the continent. It will appeal to fans of more cerebral SF, along the lines of the comparable Radius, Time Freak, I’ll Follow You Down, Volition or James vs his Future Self—many of them also shot in Sudbury. Sudburypunk!