Minor Premise (Fantasia Fest)
**Seen for the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
This is a nifty little thriller. It approaches ideas like the nature of the human soul, if memories make up much of our personality- and what might happen if they are taken away- in a way that is unique and compelling. Co-writer/director Eric Schultz is worth keeping an eye on; he has some understanding of how to build tension out of ideas and character.
When we first meet Ethan (Sathya Sridharan), he is showing his class- remotely- memory fragments, which were supposedly removed from his brain, and put on to the hard drive. How did he accomplish this? Through use of a device his late father, he and his ex-girlfriend Alli (Paton Ashbrook), had been working on before his father died recently. He’s still trying to perfect it, and he’s been using himself as a guinea pig, purging himself of memories he’d rather not remember. There’s a catch, though- he’s starting to blackout. A lot. For hours at a time. Now, he needs Alli to help him figure out what’s going on, and if there’s something in his father’s research that can help him perfect this machine.
The film introducing the idea of downloading memories, and visualizing them, immediately had me thinking of my recent watch of Wim Wenders’s “Until the End of the World,” whose final act deals with similar notions, but the notions of memory and personality also bring to mind Alex Proyas’s “Dark City.” “Minor Premise” adds an extra layer to these in the concept of how Ethan goes through cycles of personality during these blackouts, and each one makes the dilemma Ethan and Alli are trying to work through all the more complicated. It also allows Schultz and his co-writers, Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey, to add a ticking clock element of suspense to the story that gooses the tension even more, as well as danger for Alli in how she has to approach each personality. All of these elements keep us engaged in a story that seems to loop back to similar settings and challenges, making it an interesting riff on a structure like “Edge of Tomorrow” or “Happy Death Day.” Like those two films, “Minor Premise” is a nice breath of fresh air for its genre.
Minor Premise (2020) Teaser Trailer – A Bad Theology & Relic Pictures Production with Uncorked Production from Jose Ramirez on Vimeo.
