Does knowledge of one’s future affect one’s choices and one’s destiny?An unexpected though common event sidetracks your day. With time to kill you seek passive entertainment. A fortune teller communicates an ominous portent not evident until later in your week. Strange coincidences point back to the seer’s vision. You now have a choice: do you pursue what may well be an anomaly in your lifeline or will you become obsessed by the haunting, unfulfilled prophecy?
Guy Pearce plays a salesman (Jimmy Starks) whose time on this earth seems unremarkable until he acts out the latter half of the above scenario. J. K. Simmons is the almost ambivalent prophet: a man whose participation in Jimmy’s life seems unintentional by all accounts. Yet it is the psychic’s reading and his bewitched response that begins to preoccupy Stark’s mindset. Is a man’s fate outside his control or can a person practice “self-fulfilling prophecy?” Is the physical world wound by metaphysical predestination? Is it possible to know the future and if so, to change it? How do we live life facing death?
Mark Fergus in his directorial debut makes the viewer feel the characters’ tension. We almost instinctively know Stark’s next move because we would have done the same thing ourselves. We speak and act, beset not by some outside force but our own volition. Our interaction with others—friends, lover, acquaintance, boss—frays at the edge of the slim string bearing the weight of self-imposed fear. Our past, buried until we unintentionally dig it up, unearths a specter: we become Scrooge in the cemetery begging for our life.
Set in the American southwest, the stark, barren expanses of wilderness and road suggest the unknown, limited vision of one’s days. Cars driven at night with the only visible world lit by headlights create a fearful, impending doom twisted by our own consciousness. Cliff Martinez’ music underscores the dramatic anxiety resident within the human mind. We the viewers suffer with Guy Pearce (as we did in 2000’s Memento) wishing that he would find direction, and by association, our own. Taken together, the taut action, excellent direction and characterization create a classic drama worthy of thoughtful reflection.
Are our days outside our control or do we participate in our own destiny? The question is the fly, captured, left dangling in the web of the human mind.
Rated R for adult situations; some language, violence, and sexuality.
The Old Testament teaches a great deal about how God has communicated in many ways with humanity. Prophecy is important; being made aware of Another World is more important still. Mark teaches Old Testament at Crossroads Bible College.