‘Another End’ is a moody exploration of grief with no substance

Gael Garc a Bernal in Another End Photo by Marie Camille Orlando Over the past several years there have been a slew of movies and television shows centering around the idea of replacing your partner with a robot and or AI I blame Be Right Back the excellent episode of Black Mirror starring Hayley Atwell as a young woman who decides to test out a utility that allows her to talk to an AI-version of her dead husband Domhnall Gleeson Other Black Mirror episodes like Beyond the Sea grapple with this idea as well as do fresh films like s Foe and this year s Companion Another End is the latest iteration on the theme Italian director Piero Messina s film is closest to Be Right Back starring Gael Garc a Bernal as Sal a man who loses his partner Zoe in a drunk driving accident His sister Ebe B r nice Bejo works for a company that aims to help people like Sal who have lost a loved one without warning The company has created machinery where the dead person s consciousness can be uploaded to a living host body allowing the dead person s loved ones to spend a limited more days with them before saying goodbye for good While the lost loved one will be back emotionally and mentally they will not look like themselves but rather like their living host counterpart The biggest difficulty with Another End is that its main premise a company that facilitates closure between two people but one of them doesn t look like themselves is such an objectively bad idea it s a little hard to get on board Pair that with the film s interminable pacing and a third act twist that feels somehow both out of nowhere and yet incredibly predictable and you ve got an entry into the science fiction canon that feels far more interested in the aesthetic nature of its own premise than anything deeper Another End starts out with a promising opening sequence Messina allowing the audience just enough information to make them wonder what exactly is going on As Sal visits with an older woman in his building a group of men suddenly show up zip her sleeping husband into a body bag and cheerfully bid her goodnight Her husband ends up in a giant warehouse full of other hosts who all wake up and drag themselves home back to their real lives The fact that the hosts are real people is the catch that keeps Sal from automatically saying yes to this whole endeavor and once he does say yes it presents a complication he didn t quite expect While things are going well with Zoe at home his life starts to unravel when he sees Zoe s host Ava Renate Reinsve out in the real world This sort of maturation is rife with anticipated particularly when it comes to the sexual and emotional complexities that the film is trying to consider But Another End doesn t have the sense of pacing or character to pull it off Bernal and Reinsave are both incredibly capable actors but the dynamic between Sal and Zoe is muddled at best a view of a relationship where neither character seems to know themselves let alone the other person The majority of their scenes are relegated to their apartment creating a sense of stasis that deadens any modicum of chemistry between them Their dynamic is so up and down they re relationship so hot and cold it s challenging to know why they even liked each other in the first place Sal s relationship to Ava is even stranger Ava is a sex worker the fact that she works at night is one of the reasons she can afford to take the host job and has also lost someone close to her But this is the only real characterization that she gets It s not so much that she remains a mystery to Sal but that underneath her hard facade there s no complexity Ava exists as a means to the film s twist ending nothing more It s hard to write about Another End without getting into the twist which hinges on Sal s sister Ebe But the audience doesn t spend nearly enough time with Ebe to make sense of her emotions or to justify the fact that the film s end hinges so much on her decisions and feelings You can feel Messina wanting Another End to feel like The Sixth Sense the type of movie that makes you want to promptly watch it again and look for everything you missed on the first watch But there s nothing to miss with Another End It s just a sci-fi far too interested in its mood at the expense of its characters The post Another End is a moody exploration of grief with no substance appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta