6:45 (2021)

Studio:     Well Go USA
Director:    Craig Singer
Writer:     Robert Dean Klein
Producer:  Craig Singer
Stars:     Augie Duke, Michael Reed, Armen Garo, Ray Mancini, Remy Ma, Sabina Friedman-Seitz, Sasha K. Gordon, Leonardo Mancini, Allie Marshall, Joshua Matthew Smith, Thomas G. Waites

Review Score:

---

Summary:

A couple vacationing on an unusual island becomes caught in a time loop where every repeating day ends in their deaths.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Day 1

Bobby Patterson and his girlfriend Jules Rable take a ferry to the island of Bog Grove for a weekend getaway. Quirky owner Gene Pratt welcomes the couple to his cozy bed and breakfast.

Day 2

An analog alarm clock wakes Bobby at 6:45am. Bobby notices a letter addressed to him in Jules’ bag. Jules explains she wrote the letter a few weeks back when they were fighting.

Bobby finds a clump of hair on the bathroom’s bar soap. Gene says his housekeeper Shelly will clean it up.

Bobby and Jules explore the quaint town. While eating lunch, they meet bartender Larry and loudmouth barflies Brooklyn and Mark. Jules notices a hooded figure staring at her from a corner booth.

Bobby surprises Jules with a marriage proposal in front of the town’s cathedral. Jules accepts. The hooded figure suddenly slits Jules’ throat and snaps Bobby’s neck.

Day 3

Bobby wakes at 6:45am thinking their deaths were a dream. However, experiences like finding the unopened letter and clump of hair again give Bobby a sense of déjà vu.

Bobby asks Gene why the town is so quiet. Gene explains that several years ago, a vacationing couple was mysteriously murdered in front of the cathedral, and the town now honors that anniversary by suspending ferry service to the mainland.

Becoming increasingly agitated as his déjà vu escalates throughout the day, Bobby tells Jules he wants to leave Bog Grove. Jules tries to calm Bobby down.

Jules sees the hooded figure staring at her in the bar. Bobby angrily follows the figure into the bathroom where he inexplicably disappears. Jules gets angry with Bobby for showing his violent side by trying to start a fight. Bobby tries to walk Jules back to the inn via a different route than before, but they still end up murdered by the hooded figure.

Day 4

When the day repeats again at 6:45am, Bobby tries to tell Jules they are somehow stuck in a time loop. When Gene once again claims his housekeeper Shelly will replace the bar soap, Bobby questions if Shelly really exists. Jules becomes upset with Bobby for treating Gene poorly.

Bobby confronts Shelly, who turns out to be a doppelganger for Jules’ best friend Ashley. After Bobby asks for more information on the murdered couple, Shelly cryptically responds, “You know what you need to do, Bobby. Just do the right thing.”

Despite another argument over his agitated behavior, Bobby proposes to Jules over coffee. A flashback shows Bobby’s friend Cassi casting doubt on his relationship with Jules due to Bobby’s reputation for sleeping around. The hooded figure slashes Jules’ throat and breaks Bobby’s neck once again.

Day 5

To avoid the killer, Bobby suggests staying in bed all day. Jules agrees, but the hooded figure still gets inside of their room and kills them around midnight.

Day 6

Bobby tries to slightly alter events again, but the hooded figure merely kills the couple in a different location.

Day 7

Bobby gets into a physical altercation with barflies Brooklyn and Mark. Frustrated with having to bail him out of jail for fighting, Jules questions what Bobby is supposedly trying to save her from. The hooded figure kills the couple in a forest.

Day 8

From their bedroom window, Bobby seemingly sees he and Jules arriving in town for the first time. Bobby tells Jules he is going to get them coffee, but he goes to the bar instead.

Bobby asks bartender Larry for relationship advice as he confesses he impregnated Jules’ best friend Ashley and went with her for an abortion. Larry tells Bobby that he has to be honest and tell Jules the truth.

Jules finds Bobby getting drunk at the bar. The couple gets into a fight that spills outside onto a beach where the hooded figure murders them.

Day 100

Bobby finally tells Jules about Ashley and the abortion. He also reveals that there was another affair before Ashley. Jules leaves in tears. Bobby wakes up alone the next morning to discover he successfully broke the time loop.

Upon returning home, two detectives arrest Bobby for Jules’ murder. Confused, Bobby tries to explain that Jules can’t be dead because he spent the weekend with her in Bog Grove. They tell him she wasn’t there. A flashback shows Bobby previously killed Jules in a rage after she threatened to leave him.

As part of his psychological treatment in prison, doctors ask Bobby to read the letter Jules wrote about leaving him every day until he consciously admits he murdered her. Bobby still contends he isn’t a monster, and insists he actually saved Jules by beating the hooded figure and breaking the loop.

---

Review:

Why is the movie called “6:45?” Maybe someone wanted a terrible title that tells viewers absolutely nothing, or whose pedestrian plainness offers no enticement to wonder, “What’s this about?” much less smash the ‘Play Now’ button.

6:45 is also the time when an analog alarm clock wakes Bobby Patterson every morning. He and his girlfriend Jules have come to the oddly named town of Bog Grove for a quiet island getaway. They spend the day browsing sunglasses, playing pinball on the pier, bantering with barflies, and bending a knee to propose turning their troubled relationship into a marriage. Then they spend the evening having her throat slashed and his neck snapped by a hooded figure.

When Bobby wakes at the same time the following morning, he assumes their deaths were a dream. When innocuous events play out exactly as they did the day before however, Bobby starts experiencing a distinct sense of déjà vu. Hearing the innkeeper’s strange story about a vacationing couple mysteriously murdered several years ago doesn’t make Bobby any less agitated. Neither does getting killed by the hooded figure once again, despite taking a different route through town.

Dying twice confirms Bobby and Jules are somehow stuck in a time loop that resets at 6:45am. And yet for some reason, Bobby spends the next day not doing anything differently at all and barely making an attempt to tell Jules what is happening. In a sequence that plays like a filmmaking flub, Bobby still proposes marriage in the midst of all this mutilation. Then the camera jarringly jumps to a flashback of a random friend telling Bobby his romance won’t last. Somehow, they’re in the same coffee shop where Bobby proposed to Jules on this tiny island. The movie mentions that Bobby used to vacation in Bog Grove as a boy, but is this supposed to imply he goes there often, or did the producers just not secure a second location for this unnecessary scene with his friend?

Other instances of odd editing inspire intermittent head scratches too. One of the relived days is a multi-window montage of experiences from previous days. Is “6:45” suggesting Bobby is still doing everything exactly the same, or is he merely mulling memories in his head while trying to solve the mystery? Does it even matter when a movie is only mediocre?

Deciding it’s safer to stay in their room than to go out into town, Bobby and Jules spend the fifth day having sex a comical number of times not even a teenager going through puberty could keep up with. For laughs, I went back and counted. Since he checks the clock every time, we know Bobby and Jules have sex at 8:55, 11:47, 5:39, 7:37, 9:13, 10:12, and 11:11, with what looks like at least two more slow dissolves to the two leads dry humping slipped in there without timestamps. In one of those shots, the couple changes locations to go at it in a laundry room. Expending all that energy must have made Bobby momentarily forget his strategy of avoiding the killer by staying locked in their suite.

Eventually, and that’s a word doing a lot of heavy lifting, cryptic clues connect to a secret Bobby has been hiding. If he wants to rejoin reality, he’s going to have to tell Jules that secret in what has to be one of the lowest stakes reasons imaginable for powering a “Twilight Zone” premise.

Even after he figures this out though, Bobby goes all the way from day nine to day 100 without telling Jules the truth. Fortunately, we don’t have to sit through those 91 days. Still, you have to wonder about Bobby. Why would he go through this routine rigmarole that ends in his slaughter for three more months before finally doing something about it?

I’ve seen a lot of “Groundhog Day”-inspired thrillers about being caught in a time loop and “6:45” is, well, one of them. I don’t have a more favorable declaration than that. The movie starts off well enough with a serviceable setup, but questionable chemistry from the two leads, as well as the narrow consequences of their conundrum, creates very little sustainable intrigue.

I marked down “6:45” for an indifferent 50/100 score to reflect its room temperature heat as slow-burn suspense. Then I saw it won three awards for Best Feature and four for Best Director at seven different off-the-radar film festivals. Suspect events that only exist so indie filmmakers can pose with a statuette on a step-and-repeat aren’t a big bother. I take more of an issue with the slew of fake IMDb user reviews that tout “6:45” as the best thing to happen to cinema since the Lumiere brothers created their camera. So I knocked off five points, which is a light sentence frankly, as a punitive measure for trying to trick people into thinking “6:45” is an award-worthy film. Stooping to such scummy tactics says a lot about a movie’s true quality, and none of what it says is good.

Review Score: 45

---