Time is a valuable thing / watch it fly by as the pendulum swings.
Watch it count down to the end of the day / the clock ticks life away,
It’s so unreal.
Yes, this is a line from Linkin Park’s In the End. And yes, this very idea is at the center of writer/director Jon Mikel Caballero’s The Incredible Shrinking Wknd (El increíble finde menguante), one of my most-anticipated films playing at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.
During a weekend stay with friends at her family’s old vacation home, Alba (Ira del Rio) struggles to maintain a connection with her boyfriend Pablo (Adam Quintero), who breaks up with her the night before heading home. The next morning as the group is ready to depart, everything freezes and the next thing she knows, Alba is sitting in the van…heading to the vacation home again. The weekend is repeating itself. But soon Alba realizes that the weekend is not only repeating itself, but the amount of time between resets is getting shorter and shorter.
The ‘Groundhog Day’ premise in films is one that has really been overused at this point. So, if a filmmaker is planning to use the “reliving the same day” premise, they better make sure that there is something to add. For example, I personally am a fan of Happy Death Day and the direction that film takes that sets it apart from other films like it. Source Code, 12:01, Edge of Tomorrow, 50 First Dates all kind of take that repeating day flavor and make it their own.
The Incredible Shrinking Wknd is a movie not just about how time impacts us, but what we do with the time that we are given. At first, Alba uses her recurring weekend as an excuse to get hammered, get high and make guilt-free sexual advances outside of her relationship. But as Alba begins to realize that the days are getting shorter and that there is no real answer to what will happen when her time eventually runs out, how to make the time-loop stop, she begins to take stock of herself and her life. She starts to make choices about how she wants to use that time to benefit and impact the ones around her.
As that time becomes more and more precious to her, Alba begins to have to start answering questions about which relationships to her matter, which arguments and frustrations she is willing to let go of in order to keep people in her life, and what it means to truly be in love.
The film gets a little busy in other areas that end up not really being resolved or returned to. Certain events take place in one version of the weekend and then don’t happen in others, but the consequences or motivations behind those actions, made by Alba or her friends, are never really returned to. For example, after a sexual advance made by one of her friends that catches Alba completely off guard, the sexual tension in that scene (which was never really alluded to in the first place) is never revisited again. Outside of Alba and Pablo, the characters are underdeveloped and the closeness of their relationship to Alba is a bit of a question mark at times.
The film itself is beautiful and well-shot, with the frame lines slowly collapsing over the course of the runtime, representing the shrinking weekend closing in on Alba. The Incredible Shrinking Wknd is a slow-burn that takes some time to reveal itself, but while I enjoy slow-burn cinema, even I found myself at times wondering where all of this was going and when the things that I was watching would start to actually matter.
With that being said, The Incredible Shrinking Wknd is a pretty film looking at the importance of time and using that time to focus on the things that matter most before they disappear.
RATING: C+
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