There is a solid lesson to be learned from Madelines:
Never drink and time travel.
Mind you, this is common sense: any experiment combining cutting edge homemade scientific equipment and lots of math demands clear and careful thought about every single step.
Which makes rushing into it after you’ve had one (or more) too many glasses of wine a very, very bad idea.
Unfortunately, Madeline was too angry at her husband and too drunk to worry about such things. That’s why she made a major mistake in her code which means that her trip to the future set up a loop which will produce 3600 copies of herself — at a rate of one copy a day for nearly ten years. Mind you, meeting yourself is a really bad idea. In fact, it could end the universe. Possibly.
So therefore her husband has the daunting task of killing Madeline once a day. And disposing of the bodies.
Time travel. It causes so many problems.
If you haven’t guessed already, Madelines is an independent film. After all, you can’t imagine the big studios funding a time travel three-player slasher comedy. I’ll admit that I’m always thrilled when someone finds a new twist on the time travel movie (yes, even when it isn’t a particularly successful one). However, Madelines takes its wacky new idea and runs with it, spinning off one weird new twist after another, leaving us asking, ultimately, whether the Madelines are all the same, or does each one have a different personality?
And how can they possibly end the cycle of Madelines?
It’s amazing how well the Madeline sequences are handled, particularly as we end up with multiple Madelines in the later parts of the film. Obviously, there is a lot of CGI involved, but it looks quite natural, which, of course, is the ultimate goal of a film of this sort The director, Jason Richard Miller, got his start doing visual effects, and has worked on a lot of genre films over the years, including one I quite liked, the impressive killer robot drama, Automation (2019). Madelines is his third film, after a memorable start with the weird and funny road trip UFO comedy, Unidentified (2016), which also gave him a chance to show off his effects work.
Brea Grant works overtime creating all the various Madelines and tries to give them all a bit of something unique. Parry Shen is adequate as Owen, while veteran character actor, Richard Riehle (whom you may remember from Office Space) gives us yet another solid character as their financial backer (without a “jump to conclusions” mat).
Madelines is the sort of Indie science fiction film which gives me hope for the future of the genre. It’s got some clever ideas, and a killer script which wrings twist after twist out of the basic setup. It dumps its characters into increasingly bizarre situations and makes it more or less believable, even if they do accept the idea of slaughtering 3600 Madelines far more readily than most of us would.
And makes sure we know just how much hard work and preparation it would take.
You don’t find that in most slasher films…
rivets on the poster 