Time Travel Thursday: A Year From Now (2021)
Review Overview
Time Travel tropes
6Concept
6Script and direction
4Matthew Turner | On 24, Feb 2022
Director: Ricky Kennedy
Cast: Athena Hayes, Makeala Hiner-Smith, Kasey Jobe, Calvin Henson Jr, Cassidy Kelly, Thomas Elam, Brad Maule, Ricky Kennedy, Daniel May, Susan Triana
Certificate: TBC
Has Boss Level whetted your appetite for more time travel titilation? Transport yourself no further than Time Travel Thursday, our column devoted to time travel movies. It’s on Thursday.
Clearly drawn to the time travel genre, writer-director Ricky Kennedy follows up his 2014 mock-doc debut The History of Time Travel with this low-budget feature that plays like a cross between Groundhog Day and A Christmas Carol. The result is a sweet-natured finding-yourself drama that doesn’t quite do justice to its intriguing premise.
The film begins on Christmas Eve, 2012, with directionless paralegal Veronica Novak (Athena Hayes) arriving at her parents’ suburban home. Already jealous of both academic high-flyer younger brother Max (Kasey Job) and successful lawyer older sister Emily (Cassidy Kelly), Veronica quickly becomes exasperated when faced with a barrage of questions about her going-nowhere career and why she doesn’t have a boyfriend yet.
Escaping the family home, Veronica vents her frustrations to bar-owning best friend Debbie (Makeala Hiner-Smith), vowing: “A year from now, things will be different.” However, when she wakes up the next day, it’s an entire year later and – although major changes have occurred in her family – nothing has changed for her. To her horror, the pattern continues, as every day she wakes up to discover she’s lost another year.
In terms of time travel tropes, the film gets some good mileage out of the initial discovery – Veronica’s horror at her sister marrying the boyfriend (Thomas Elam) she’s only “just” met, Max having a different girlfriend every year, her father’s (Brad Maule) suspicious cough and so on. However, the script seems to run out of ideas after that, and it’s frustrating that Veronica barely even vocalises her problem, let alone tries to do something about it.
Initially it seems as if the set-up is a fairly decent metaphor for life passing you by and the need to seize opportunities while you have them. The problem is that the script essentially breaks its own rules, since Veronica goes from doing nothing in the years that pass overnight to actually improving her life in ways that the audience don’t see and Veronica doesn’t remember.
The effect of that is to make Veronica too much of a passive character in her own story – it’s basically like Phil Connors becoming a better person in Groundhog Day, but without us seeing him put the work in. To be fair, the film does have some other things to say – for one thing, it deserves praise for the refreshing way it handles the expected relationship angle, although it would have been even better with a more charismatic actor in the role of Veronica’s prospective love interest.
The other main issue is that the script blatantly ignores its own plot-holes. For example, the subplot involving Veronica’s father’s illness should be moving, not least because she only remembers one day a year and her time jumping experience robs her of key moments and memories in their life together. The script’s solution basically just pretends that isn’t happening and settles for a sentimental montage instead, implying that Veronica is happy with just that short time spent with her father rather than angry at all the lost days.
For such an obviously low-budget production, the performances are fine, particularly Athena Hayes, who has a quality that’s reminiscent of Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza. There are also a couple of decent jokes, although Kennedy’s rickety direction almost spoils them.
Ultimately, the script never quite manages to make the Groundhog Day angle work, essentially requiring the Christmas Carol angle to come in and do the emotional heavy lifting. To that end, it just about works, but the poorly thought-out plot is frequently frustrating along the way.