Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Sam Odlum
Starring: Freya Tingley, Charles Grounds, Elise Jansen, Laura
Wheelwright, Brendan Bacon
What is it that separates you or I from the alcoholics, the junkies and
the other lost souls compulsively mired in addiction? After all, we've
both experienced hangovers, a toxic little warning that we've overstepped
the mark and taken on more than we could successfully metabolise in one
night, where the booze or whatever got the better of us. And despite
pledging "never again," we DID do it again, possibly even the next week -
that noxious missive conveniently forgotten. Yet, despite these missteps,
we can ultimately take or leave it, and looking forward to a drink or
other substances during the working week is just that: a "desire," and not
the "need" which typifies addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse
puts the illness of addiction down to factors such as "[experiencing]
abuse, early exposure, stress, and parental guidance," but in my
experience it is luck or lack of luck which is the major factor that
demarcates the boundaries of use and abuse. What was initially a release,
a way of making a drab world momentarily more colourful becomes, via
chance, a trap itself for the unlucky few; a joyless loop of scoring,
using, feeding the habit, rinse, repeat.
Take the hapless pair at the centre of Sam Odlum's lively debut
Time Addicts, drug dependent Denise and Johnny (Freya Tingley and
Charles Grounds), platonic mates who eke out the typically liminal
existence of addicts. They hang out in the abandoned expanse of grey
concrete car parks strewn with broken bottles and dry whippets, circling
about on a push bike in their dirty jackets (the irl signifier of someone
who has slipped off the edge: that ever-present smelly jacket), killing
the stretch until the next fix, which in their case is crystal meth (it's
not a competition but surely the most insidious of all drugs?). Time has
different meaning for the addict: notwithstanding how chemicals affect the
part of the brain known as the Shatner's Bassoon, there is the cruelly
elastic stretch of space between being On Drugs and not. "It’s a bit
weird, no life," Denise observes, before the two inevitably decide to
angle for the next fix.
A side symptom of being an all-encompassed addict is that you must pay for
the privilege, and it's not even that drugs are expensive, but when you
look and behave like shit (That push bike? Stolen) it's difficult to
obtain gainful employment. They're already in hock to local dealer Kane
(Joshua Morton), a grim entrepreneur who intuitively grasps that
there are other ways to pay and duly blackmails the two into robbing a
local dive house on pain of losing their thumbs-! Problem is of course,
once they've negotiated the grim suburban gothic of the flophouse and
located the loot, upon inspection it turns out to be a big bag of lovely
pink meth, glowing ruby in the squalor (a neat visual metaphor for the
appeal of controlled substances).
Without a second's thought as to why Kane would send two card carrying
junkies to retrieve a big trove of their drug of choice, the two make to
sample the goods. And Johnny promptly disappears - not down the k-hole,
but into thin air: the 1.21 gigawatts powered ice has only gone and sent
him back in time! What follows as the pair smoke the meth and experience a
trip which takes them across space and time for real is an intensely
satisfying comedic time-travel film; a genre uniquely suited to the visual
and narrative dynamics of cinema, a medium which is itself, after all, a
manifestation of manipulated time and space. I can't spoil the clever,
devastating temporal twists of the ensuing Möbius plot but suffice to say
that as the storyline leaps back and forth along the chronology of the
house, creating significance out of throwaway moments and subverting
assumptions, Time Addicts is an absolute treat.
Like the pinpoint planning which characterises Time Addicts' structure, there was no accident in Kane sending our two yahoos to the
house, and the previous owners may too be tied up with the lineage of some
of our leads. It is de rigueur for time travel protagonists
(protaggregatonists?) to meet future and past selves, but the hereditary
connections and revelations at play here would make Marty McFly (even
more) dizzy. Odlum manages the symbiotic, frantic narrative with a
thrilling deftness - typing with it on in the background as a pleasing
second viewing, through my headphones I can make out the dialogue of
future scenes concurrently occurring in different parts of the house to
the action unfolding onscreen! The attention to detail and the operational
mischief is a delight.
Ok, perhaps the central motivation of the antagonist is a bit loose, but
the emotional core provided by Tingley and Grounds (quantum) leaps over
such a quibble: in their hapless thrall to "the tick," their agitated
co-dependency and frantic profanity (as Australians they use swear words
as lyrical punctuation – that's not racist as I have relations Down Under)
Denise and Johnny feel real. And if the bittersweet ending of
Time Addicts feels a little loose, then perhaps that too is
in keeping with the unfulfilled lot of the addict, caught up in a loop
which is far beyond their control and doomed to be unsatisfied.
Time Addicts is on UK/ROI VOD now.
