Tori Butler-Hart

(On TV, April 2022) It’s perfectly acceptable to be unsure about liking a film for the longest time, especially as it unfolds. While most movies show their colours early on, others remain on a razor’s edge throughout their duration. Those are often high-concept plot-driven films where the conclusion may have a much more pronounced role in any overall appreciation, or where we’re not completely sure of what’s happening before the big final revelation puts everything back into context. A pure product of the early Covid film era, Infinitum: Subject Unknown looks and feels as if it was shot in mid-2020: It features a handful of actors, and spends the vast majority of its running time focused on a single character moving in deserted landscapes empty of any other human presence. The narrative hook is not bad, as a character wakes up in an attic and tries to understand why she’s alone and why everyone else is missing. Meanwhile, a prologue has Ian MacKellen as some sort of scientist-entrepreneur-philosopher (a performance entirely delivered by videoconference for headliner value – he’s not in the film for more than five minutes) and we sometime cut to observers commenting on the actions of the protagonist. At regular intervals, our protagonist gets too excited and wakes back in the attic, having to redo everything done until then. There are many ways this scenario could have gone (VR, gaming, aliens, and multiverses are just a few explanations that come to mind) but Infinitum: Subject Unknown makes two fatal mistakes in the way it goes about it: First, its naturalistic execution quickly replaces intellectual suspense by tedious boredom. Then it makes some incredibly boneheaded decisions along the way (such as the trapped protagonist meekly poking around the attic, which has both a chair and a window to smash, before simply lying on the floor to sleep) and reruns the same sequences far too often to be effective about it. Then, at the very end, the film falters by not really providing any satisfactory answer to any of its mysteries. Having held on to such an unsatisfactory payoff until the very last moment, Infinitum: Subject Unknown is unsatisfying by design. A steady drip of revelations may have lessened the blow, but then again it becomes clear that our lead character is far too dumb to understand any of it. I applaud the bare-bones low-budget production history of this husband-and-wife film (Tori Butler-Hart stars and co-wrote/produced; Matthew Butler-Hart directs and co-wrote/produced), but since good dialogue costs the same to write and shoot as bad dialogue, would it have killed them to offer something more than a platitude at the end? Hey, I would have been proud to emerge from the lockdown months with a completed movie – but there’s a difference between having one and having one that’s interesting to others.