Ingress is one of those films that at first glance doesn't look like it is a decent fit for a horror based blog. Truth be told, the Rachel Noll James written and directed sci-fi movie doesn't really have any moments of horror, but there are some themes that I personally love, and so I always jump at the chance to watch films including them. I love films about time travel, so they always get a free pass, but I also love the idea of multiverses. Sure, this topic might not appeal to everyone, especially after the glut of not so stunning Marvel films dealing with the topic, but its still a cool thing to think about. There is scope for this subject to be a confusing mess, but Ingress deals with it in quite a thoughtful if not perfect fashion.
With a nearly two hour run time there is plenty of time to ease the viewer into the set-up for the film. For the first forty or so minutes we exist alongside the protagonist character of Riley (played by Noll James herself) and have to try and piece together what is happening to her without any type of easy explanation. It appears that Riley has the unwelcome ability to travel between different realities, but that this ability isn't something she has had much control over in the past. In the present Riley has found a method to combat this travelling, and by recognising the early signs of it happening (represented on screen by a loud buzzing noise and the world around her starting to become digitally distorted), is able to prevent it happening.
Riley discovers that there is a man in the small town she lives in that might understand exactly what she has gone through. This man, Daniel (Christopher Clark in his film debut according to IMDB), is able to channel a consciousness calling itself 'Lucas' (voiced by Tim DeKay - Oppenheimer, The Crow: Salvation), this being states it has the power to be able to give Riley what she is most desperately missing in her life, something she believes to be the ability to travel to a dimension where her recently deceased husband Toby (Johnny Ferro) still lives.
It was interesting to me how the film allows you to just exist alongside Riley for the film's first act, before giving you an exposition dump on her prior life via an interview she has with Daniel. It was nice how neatly that all matched up with the information provided to the viewer. The film takes itself seriously, and wants the subject to be looked at in a mature way. This is sometimes to the detriment of the story being told, or at least it felt that way to me. There came a point in the movie where it felt like events were progressing nicely. There was a good mix of drama and romance, with an undercurrent of sci-fi. This leads to a mostly confusing third act in which Daniel develops into a protagonist in his own right, rather than a side character. While Riley is off trying to deal with her very strange curse, Daniel is off trying to deal with his own demons. With 'Lucas' having been with him his whole life, he had a troubled childhood, with it assumed he was schizophrenic, and this is something that still causes him to doubt himself. These events were both needed I feel, but it did rip the momentum out of the story a tiny bit, even if it leads to some neat moments where characters get to experience if 'the grass really is greener on the other side' as the saying goes.
Outside of the visible digital and audio effects used to display Riley's travelling, there are lots of moments where echoes of alternate presents bleed into the film, with both protagonists seeing ghostly visions, people appearing and speaking dialogue before fading away into nothing. Some of the ideas where terrifying in a real world sense, something people would be able to empathise with. The mid-film moment where Riley explains that one day she moved realities to discover her parents had died many years previously, and that since that point she had been unable to find a reality in which they still lived was heart breaking, and represented well by a flashback scene showing the moment this happened to her as a teen. Effects used throughout are all obviously digital ones, but there isn't much you can do when the effects need to demonstrate people phasing out of existence. There was one neat scene where Daniel is face-to-face with his inner voice of Lucas shown by him talking to an alternate version of himself in a mirror.
Ingress put a lot of thought into best getting its ideas across to the viewer. It may have lost me a bit in the slightly confusing later part of the film, but still got me enough in the feels that I did find myself getting a little bit teary in the epilogue of the movie. I thought Noll James, Clark, and Ferro in particular were perfect choices for the characters they played, and the rest of the cast were solid with no one feeling out of place. Ingress was released theatrically on January 23rd in ten theatres across the U.S, has previously been nominated for nine awards, and is the first narrative feature film helmed by US and UK-based production company, Emergence Films.
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