Review: The Infinite Man
A prime example of how a film can wear its influences on its sleeve and still glide on its own fantastical orbit, The Inifinite Man is a bedazzling work that announces a talent to watch in writer-director Hugh Sullivan.
Dean (Josh McConville) has brought girlfriend Lana (Hannah Marshall) to the seaside hotel where they spent their last anniversary. He means to recreate the happiness they experienced that previous year down to the last detail, even ensuring that Hannah is wearing the same dress as the year before and creating an itinerary he believes to be the blueprint to the perfect anniversary weekend. His plans are instantly dashed when they arrive to discover the hotel shuttered and abandoned. Lana isn't too fussed, she's content to go to the beach, but for a control freak like Dean, this simply will not do.
He convinces her to stick to the script so he can reveal his anniversary present: an external limbic system - a headpiece of coloured spools and wires - that will record and preserve the happiness they're about to experience from the weekend so they can relive their bliss over and over again. Just when they're about to start the process, Lana's ex-boyfriend Terry (Alex Dimitriades) arrives to ruin their holiday and win back the woman who broke up with him four years ago after two weeks of dating. Dean winds up getting cattle prodded by Terry, and abandoned when Lana ends up driving off with the javelin-throwing lug.
A year passes, during which time Dean has remained in the hotel, building a machine that will allow him to travel back in time. He convinces Lana to give their relationship one more try by traveling back to that fateful weekend. It wasn't the best weekend, was it? she reminds him, but he wants to return to change the controllable variables and engineer a successful outcome. Herein is where the fun begins. The travel back in time sets off an endless loop of events that collide and cluster; the vacated hotel is soon overrun by multiple versions of the couple, each partner pairing with other iterations of themselves, as Dean attempts to mitigate the multiplicity and untangle the temporal knots.
The Infinite Man functions like a surreal Feydeau farce during its middle section, but also treads into the emotional waters in which Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind happily splashed. Dean battles his past and future selves, not wholly registering that he might evolve into one of his seemingly better mutations, namely the one with whom Lana has reconciled. He's jealous and frustrated of his selves, some of whom are determined not to let this tightly wound, possibly mentally ill Dean jeopardise their timelines.
Sullivan somehow makes it all work, managing to layer in comic and melancholic notes. Terry eventually joins the chaos ("I didn't want to be excluded.") and the biggest guffaws emanate from the deadpan manner in which he interacts with his other selves. McConville and Marshall find subtle shadings in their numerous incarnations. For all its impressive bells and whistles, The Infinite Man is a story about the inherent complications of any relationship. Love is immune to intellectualism and, despite Dean's efforts to craft unassailable equations based on previously successful scenarios, defies easy capture.
The Infinite Man
Directed by: Hugh Sullivan
Written by: Hugh Sullivan
Starring: Josh McConville, Hannah Marshall, Alex Dimitriades
