Sophie Turner

(On Cable TV, July 2019) I didn’t have the best of reaction to Time Freaks’ first act. As a time-travelling romance (a surprisingly robust subgenre) from promising writer-director Andrew Bowler, it features a physics genius inventing a time machine just so that he can go back in time and prevent his girlfriend from dumping him. The time-travelling mechanism isn’t particularly rigorous (sometimes going back in time at the touch of a smartphone app, sometimes requiring an audio-drive machine and for goodness’ sake don’t ask about the details) but it’s not really the point for a film taking a comic approach to the complications offered by time travel in recreating crucial moments of a relationship. My grumpiness at Time Freak’s first act had to do with two remarkably anti-romantic convictions (which you should forgive given that I’m in the anti-romantic phase of my life): The first being that whatever the protagonist achieves will be based on a foundation of lies that will not support a real relationship; and the second being that those two characters have no business being together in the long run. To my relief, the film does address the first point quite thoroughly (it becomes much of the film’s third act) and battered me into acceptance regarding the second point. Asa Butterfield does a fine job portraying a highly intelligent scientist with relationship issues (although the script often doesn’t do him any favours by re-highlight what should be obvious to anyone), while I’m becoming increasingly convinced that I don’t really like Sophie Turner even in a romantic lead role such as here. Skyler Gisondo does rather good work in a more broadly comic supporting role. Time Freak doesn’t always get its tonal shifts correctly, occasionally going from silly humour to romantic drama (and back) in a less than graceful fashion, but there’s an interesting thesis about relationship being developed through its time-travelling shenanigans—and it should be noted that while much of the film is about younger protagonists and their own relationship issues, it becomes more sombre once there’s a time-skip that takes us past college years. I gradually warmed to the film as it kept exploring its own ideas farther and farther, all the way to a conclusion that should satisfy both the cynics and the romantics. As low-budget science-fiction films go, Time Freak is really not bad, and a clear notch above most other straight-to-cable SF movies.