Time Lapse – Review

A small budget movie with big ideas, Time Lapse has a really cool premise and decent execution. While I don’t love where the script spends some of its time, the movie is undeniably interesting in concept and for me still fairly solid in execution.

Artist Finn (O’Leary) lives with his girlfriend Callie (Panabaker) and their friend Jasper (Finn). One must assume at one point it made sense as to why these people are all hanging out, but for now we just have to be like okay, yeah, these people should totally live together. Anyway. So, Finn is having some usual movie trouble for an artist, namely block. Uh oh. Will he ever recover?

This becomes a point of contention for him and everyone around him as the blank canvas mocks him. The crew also work around their apartment complex, cleaning and doing odd jobs, and helping manage the place for some extra cash. Unfortunately, their neighbor across the street stopped paying rent. He is an elderly man, so Callie goes to check on him. Noting newspapers piled up, she decides to let herself into Mr. Bezzerides’ (Rhys-Davies) apartment, hoping that the man is okay but fearing for the worst.

What she finds however is something else. In the man’s living room, and pointed across the courtyard and directly at her own shared apartment living room window, is a huge device with a gigantic lens. It looks like a possible camera of some sort and makes a strange hum. On the wall behind the camera? Rows and rows of polaroid-type pictures, lined from ceiling to floor.

The pictures appear to show the roommates in their daily lives, as they do things in their living room. What the hell is going on? Then… the camera springs to life and snaps a picture while the trio of roommates investigates. What does this photo show? Well, that is super hard to tell, but it is a strange picture showing strange things happening in their apartment, and those events appear to not have happened yet.

Time Lapse has a really good idea at its core premise, and it has decent execution despite a lesser-known cast and constrained budgets. It is virtually one location however presents a few good story ideas and explores a bit of the core idea of the film. There is a lot more to think about when it comes to the plot.

I think ultimately this could have been way better, and focused on more interesting ideas, but I am sure a bit of the constraint was budget, and there is a lot to consider when writing a movie like this, and a script can only cover so much in a sub-2-hour runtime. The acting does the job, but I wanted a bit more at times from the main trio also at times.