Entangled (2019)

Gaurav Seth came to my attention a few years ago with a very clever time travel film, Prisoner X, which combined a truly unique take on a familiar SF trope with a deft touch.

So the announcement that he was working on a second SF film came as a pleasant surprise. After all, Seth, who trained at the prestigious Russian Institute of Cinema under Tarkovsky’s cinematographers, had made several far more “serious” films before moving to genre film.

Although Prisoner X was as much a political thriller as a time travel film.

Entangled offers a similar mix, as it is primarily a thriller and mystery story.  A brilliant young scientist and her friends accidentally find a way to bring things into our universe from the parallel universes predicted by certain interpretations of quantum physics.

Unfortunately, their first attempt to do so leads to her death in a car accident and they abandon the project.

But things get a lot stranger several months later when the dead girl suddenly walks back into their lives, wondering why everyone is behaving so strangely towards her.

And before long, things get even more complicated…

I liked this one. It isn’t as good as Prisoner X, and I have some serious scientific reservations about it, but as a thriller it is well crafted and suspenseful.

But first, let’s get a minor grumble out of the way (and I’ll concede this is one of my pet peeves these days): the trailer reveals a major twist that takes place about halfway into the film!

Oh, well. That’s so common these days one hardly notices, but at least it isn’t as bad as some of our modern trailers (with What Lies Beneath perhaps the worst all-time offender!).

Once again we have a science fiction film revolving around quantum physics, and once again we see it used to give us a weird story twist with only minimal connection to actual physics. We see this a lot these days as there have been plenty of extravagant, if highly speculative, claims made about the quantum realm. This time, the Many Worlds interpretation gets invoked with a lot of talk about identical and nearly identical parallel universes.

Now I’ll admit that it bugs me that this comes with the usual references to infinite universes, as this interpretation features new universes branching off whenever there are multiple quantum possibilities. This would yield a mind-bogglingly vast multiverse — but not an infinite one.

However, that’s such a common error that I’m willing to overlook it.

More to the point, the film seems unconcerned with what should be a major problem — the sudden appearance of what might be incompatible matter from another reality — and instead focuses on the question of duplicating living things.

And somehow, I doubt if the solution suggested here would work.

Nor am I entirely happy with the ironic twist at the end as we are never given any explanation for what happens.

As I said before, I liked this film: it has strong characters and solid performances; it looks very good, is suspenseful and well written.

But I’m afraid that it won’t please the scientific nitpickers out there.

And it really needed something — even a few stray remarks dropped in here and there — to set up that final twist.

Other, that is, than relying on that familiar trope, Quantum physics equals “weird.”

I will, however, be among those watching when Gaurav Seth makes his third SF film.

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