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The silence is thick with tension. Martel mentions some name Hobie and Vanessa gets instantly furious. She made it clear that that name was off-limits. She has to step out and take a stroll in the woods. She needs to see some trees and inhale some fresh air. Alex ensures that she leaves with a rifle over her shoulder, just in case. There are bears in there.
Before we talk about what’s scarier than a bear, we should probably go over who Hobie is first. He is the son of Alex and Vanessa and died in a car accident. That led to her being at fault. Guilt, grief, blame, loss. To some degree, it’s a never-ending cycle. And my answer to that? Divorce. Therapy. Meds. I know the math seems crazy, but I’ve learned in the past that there is no timeline for pain.
As Vanessa heads home from a hike, she suddenly hears multiple gunshots. One of them rips through the tree she was using to hide. Panicking, she picks up her rifle and looks at the sniper. It’s herself, looking wide-eyed and terrified. She shoots back and runs home. When questioned, she claims, I saw a bear. What a lie. Why is she so wound up? Is she entering a stage of psychosis? This won’t help her with her intense sadness. Later during dinner, Martel, her physicist husband gives a perplexing rant about how control is an illusion, which certainly does not help her. While it sets the stage for the film, Vanessa’s reality will not allow her to hear such nonsense. She may not go back to the woods, but for the narrative’s sake, she does, only to get lost in a repetitive loop of teleporting around, CURIOUS.
So combine Aldis Hodge and Stephanie Deadwyler’s hard-hitting drama with the low-key sci-fi doppelganger isms of Swan Song. Or everything everywhere all at once, and mix it with some groundhog headtrippery. You will not be disappointed.
Performance Worth Watching Aldis and Deadwyler give enough oomph to their characters to make you believe there’s more to grief than meets the eye. They want a reason to evoke stronger emotions, so one hopes a beefier dramatic project comes along to capture their attention.
Doppelganger Alex states, But trust me I know this makes no sense, and thus begins I know this doesn’t make any sense, but trust me the movie.
It’s clear that Parallel’s budget was rather on the low side, as the saying goes; it’s a hell of a lot less than Everything Everywhere All at Once, or perhaps A Little Bit Right Here in Two Locations is more suitable. To be ‘fair’ I should point out, that those locations are actually multiple locations on multiple timelines, but they all look the same. This is a bit mind-boggling but that is very much the case and that is how this world, for the most part, views what is going on in the story, which is mostly from Vanessa’s perspective. You see, the Tree Portal allows one to enter multiple parallel worlds, and how it works is that the same clearing in the forest is shot from different angles. Reality is splintered into god-knows-how-many shards. Infinite, one assumes. Perhaps there’s a reason Alt Vanessa No. 1 was trying to put enough bullets in Regular Vanessa to make her stop breathing in this or any universe.
I won’t go further into this discussion for the reason that a fine probing into the idea, or any of its many forms is sufficient to trigger my head in the same manner as a Basketball is dribbled. As is bound to happen, these matters reveal their gaps, and after a while, it becomes impossible to carry any narrative water. So credit goes to the Hodges, with their co-author Jonathan Keasey, as well as to the director Kourosh Ahari, for appreciating the shelf life of a fully filled water balloon and for controlling the film’s duration to 88 minutes. My head can hardly take much more of the self-inflicted pain of knowing that every decision made can never be undone, and in its deviant core, Parallel stands as a tragedy of sorts, emitting a deeply steeped gloom swaddled with melodramatic elements. I’ve accepted that it’s mostly functional but overwhelmingly melancholic, with maybe just a sprinkle of hope.
Others will find it to have philosophical depth and possibly intriguing while some may think of the film as tiresome. The fact that its core idea remains untouched is a sign of its focus, and so too is its minimalistic tenor. It begins with very little and does not do a lot with it, but that’s a whole lot more than nothing. If that sentence makes you feel like you are being spun around until you are dizzy, then you know what it feels like to be Vanessa wandering the Woods Where Time and Space Have No Meaning.
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