I watch a lot of low-budget, never-heard-of-it flicks on Amazon, and most of them are garbage. But every now any then I'm pleasantly surprised, and this was one of those cases. Despite some red flags (the characters share their names with the actors who play them, a suspiciously high IMDb star rating, etc) I gave this one a chance and I'm glad I did.
The film follows a couple, Maclain and Clare. They are struggling with infertility and Maclain is also dealing with strange dreams involving his brother and the childhood death of his parents. In an attempt to help Maclain, Clare finds Maclain's estranged brother, Jake, and invites him to have Christmas with them at the family cabin. What Clare doesn't realize is that the reason the brothers have drifted apart is that Jake is utterly convinced that he is a time traveler.
On the positive side, the three leads have pretty good chemistry. The lead couple are married in real life, and I see from looking through all of their pages that they've all worked on several films together. They have a real, lived-in comfort with each other that elevates the group banter. There are also several funny moments. I really like low-key sci-fi films (think Happy Accidents with Marissa Tomei), and so I enjoyed the goofy premise of Jake's possible time-traveling. If the film really was made in 6 days (as claimed in the trivia), that's pretty impressive. Overall it looks professional. If you're familiar with the horror-comedy "Crush the Skull," I'd compare this film to it in terms of how well it worked with a small cast and limited budget.
On the down side I only had two really negatives. One is that the film takes a turn in the last 20 minutes toward a more serious tone and some drama, and that shift is kind of jarring. I appreciate that the film is trying to address some of the issues it brought up throughout, but it packs a lot of serious moments/confrontations/outbursts into a short stretch of time and it feels too abrupt. My other complaint is specific maybe to me: there was a joke involving the killing of animals that I just didn't appreciate, and generally humor around the handling of a gun that made me cringe more than it made me laugh.
Overall I think that this one's worth checking out. It's a fun mash-up of a Christmas movie and a low-budget sci-fi drama and I quite enjoyed it.
