ANTI MATTER (2016)

Studio:       Uncork’d Entertainment
Director:    Keir Burrows
Writer:       Keir Burrows
Producer:  Dieudonnee Burrows
Stars:     Yaiza Figueroa, Tom Barber-Duffy, Philippa Carson, Noah Maxwell Clarke, James Farrar, Yolanda Vazquez, Casey Lawler, Harrie Hayes, Julia Savill

Review Score:

---

Summary:

An amnesiac graduate student’s life mysteriously unravels after she tests a teleportation wormhole on herself.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Ana Carter, a U.S. citizen working on her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Oxford University in England, successfully vanishes an electron in a laboratory experiment. Ana brings aboard fellow grad student Nate, who is also her love interest, to help conduct further research.

Because they need significantly more computer power, Nate brings programmer Liv into the project. Liv writes code for a worm that clandestinely hacks hundreds of thousands of computers that are used to process the algorithms and power the apparatus.

Ana, Nate, and Liv eventually discover that they created a wormhole with which they can teleport matter. As the project expands, they begin testing on live animal subjects ranging from a silkworm to Liv’s grandmother’s cat.

Liv discovers Microsoft released a patch that will shut down her computer worm. With only one day to finish testing before taking their work to investors, the trio draws matches to determine who will be their human test subject. Ana is chosen.

Ana blacks out after teleporting several feet. The next day, Ana discovers that she cannot remember anything that happened after she phased through the wormhole.

Ana is approached by James, who is part of an animal rights activist group protesting against Oxford, outside of the lab. Ana also notices police officers recording video of the protestors as well as anyone entering the building.

Ana enters the lab to find that Nate and Liv dialed the experiment all the way back to displacing atoms. Ana begins growing suspicious of Nate and Liv’s furtive behavior, as they continually deflect her questions regarding what happened after the experiment. Ana also starts suspecting that Nate and Liv are now romantically involved.

When Ana returns to her flat, she finds a person in a chimpanzee mask stealing her papers and personal items. Ana tackles the intruder through a second story window. After a chase through the streets, Ana falls down a concrete staircase and is knocked unconscious. The intruder escapes.

Ana receives a call from her mother Mariana in Florida regarding a voicemail Ana doesn’t remember leaving. Nate seems oddly unconcerned about the break-in at Ana’s place. Liv continues behaving coldly toward Ana. Oxford students learn that the university is conducting an investigation with GCHQ, suspecting that the worm may have been an act of cyber-terrorism.

Still unable to form new memories, Ana begins keeping track of events in a notepad. Ana’s suspicions regarding Nate and Liv escalate again when she discovers that the chemical storage closet in their lab is now inexplicably locked.

With animal rights protestors expanding their activity on campus, James vaguely threatens Ana once more regarding the use of animal subjects in her experiments. Ana starts having mental flashes where she sees various suspects unmasked as the person who robbed her apartment. She also begins experiencing vivid, but fleeting dreams of events she does not remember experiencing, as well as visions of the locked closet.

Ana breaks into the lab at night. Through a window she sees a chimpanzee mask on a desk in the locked storage closet. Ana finds additions to the wormhole apparatus she does not remember building, including a long cord to a digital weight scale. Knowing that she broke into the lab, Nate calls Ana and arranges for them to have dinner the following evening.

At dinner, Ana again implores Nate to tell her what is really happening. Nate insists that Ana must trust him and stop digging deeper into the experiment. Nate warns that they are in more danger now that the university is investigating the worm.

Nate tells Ana to call her mother, causing Ana to question why Nate would mention her at all. Tensions among the trio rise again when the investigation into the worm begins. Ana wonders if Nate and Liv are trying to steal her research. Ana also openly wonders that if the wormhole only transported matter, what happened to parts of her that aren’t matter, i.e. her soul?

Ana calls her mother again. Mariana suspiciously questions who Ana is, as Ana supposedly told her previously to not speak to anyone claiming to be her unless Mariana was given a password.

Ana researches brain damage and memory loss, wondering if memories can have weight. Her dreams and visions continue. A package from Mariana arrives in the mail.

With her mind cracking from the stress and suspicions, Ana confronts Nate and Liv in the lab. Ana is confused when she calls a maintenance man to unlock the storage closet and he tells her that he already gave her the key.

GCHQ investigator Mr. Stovington questions Ana. Stovington tells Ana that he knows she wrote the worm, but he wants to know what it does. Ana refuses to answer his questions.

James and the protestors openly confront Ana at the university, causing her temper to flare. Ana finds her notebook missing. Nate calls out Ana for not dropping her investigation. Ana again demands to know what is happening. Nate insists that he and Liv do tell her what is happening, but she keeps forgetting.

Ana breaks into Nate’s apartment where she finds the camcorder video of her teleportation. Freeze-framing the video shows that the experiment somehow created a duplicate Ana.

Ana pulls a gun when Nate walks in on her. Nate tells Ana he will explain what is going on, but only if she returns to the lab with him because she will not remember what he says. Nate takes a phone call. Ana’s frustration boils over when Nate doesn’t say who called. Nate hands over the phone and Ana’s gun fires in the confusion. A bullet grazes Nate’s neck.

Ana runs to the lab. Ana attempts to turn herself in to Stovington and another cop by confessing about the wormhole and claiming that she lost her soul. Liv pulls Ana into the lab.

His neck still bloody, Nate meets both women in the lab. Nate and Liv explain to Ana that when she phased, the wormhole was open too long and created a vacuum. The resulting gravity field distorted their readings. The trio elected to send Ana through a second time, but rigged a weight sensor to immediately cut the wormhole after she transferred. This second experiment resulted in the creation of a second Ana.

Ana demands to know what she is, asking if she is a clone. Still suspicious of Nate and Liv, Ana fires her gun as a warning when her frustration rages again. Nate and Liv have Ana look at her blood under a microscope, which proves she is a quantum anomaly. Nate explains that Ana has photonic weight, but she is merely light that was left behind by the teleportation. Nate further explains that she is not “real” in a normal sense, which is why she hasn’t been eating, drinking, or forming memories.

The real Ana emerges from the storage closet. The real Ana adds that she feels hollow since the mirror Ana separated from her. Mirror Ana learns that her dream flashes are from the mind of the real Ana. Ana had continued a romance with Nate that mirror Anna distorted into seeing as visions of Nate with Liv.

Liv rewrites the wormhole code to be defined by mass instead of by volume. Nate, Liv, and the real Ana explain that they want to reopen the wormhole to essentially erase the mirror Ana.

Mirror Ana balks at the notion of being destroyed. Mariana calls her and they have a tearful conversation. Mirror Ana opens the package she received earlier, which turns out to be an audio cassette tape of Ana and her mother practicing piano together 22 years earlier. As the real Ana takes the gun and the phone, mirror Ana tells Mariana that she loves her.

Mirror Ana asks if she can stay inside the storage closet. Nate tells her that they tried that already, but she becomes dangerous when she forgets who they are and why she is there.

The real Ana whispers something to mirror Ana that calms her. Mirror Ana ultimately agrees to go back through the wormhole. With a tearful resolve, mirror Ana is phased out of existence.

Afterward, Nate, Liv, and Ana discuss what to do next. They agree to move the project forward and seek formal funding. To make the computer worm investigation go away, Ana suggests that Liv frame the animal rights activists for the blame.

---

Review:

Oxford PhD candidate Ana Carter almost can’t believe her own experiment’s success when she makes an electron disappear.  The thing of it is, she has no idea where it went.

Enter fellow grad student Nate.  More than merely Ana’s romantic interest, Nate helps Ana take her research to a level where marbles pull the same Copperfield as the microscopic particles preceding them.  Neither aspiring scientist is certain what is happening, though they do know they need to push further.

Anxious for more processing power to keep algorithms calculating and the apparatus electrified, computer programmer Liv joins the clandestine project.  Liv writes code for a worm that hacks thousands of networked servers.  With the behemoth bump in silicon brainpower, the trio discovers they’ve created a wormhole, and are soon sending silkworms and housecats several feet across the lab.

Ana, Nate, and Liv have a short window with the computer worm to get data ducks in a row before wooing potential investors.  That means a human has to go through the wormhole asap, and Ana draws that short straw.

Ana successfully teleports before blacking out.  But when she comes to, Ana can’t remember what happened.  What’s worse, Nate and Liv seemingly have no intention of telling her.  Inexplicably, masked intruders, aggressive activists, and suspicious investigators now have Ana centered in their crosshairs as a brain-scrambling conspiracy develops.  The only person Ana can trust to uncover the truth is herself.  Except without the ability to form new memories, and with strange visions amplifying newfound paranoia, Ana can no longer rely on her own mind either.

It can be inadvertently easy to become lost in the opening act of “Anti Matter.”  Throwaway “techspeak” is hellbent on selling the science behind the fiction with blistering blather about photonic energy calculations.  Don’t let the movie’s habit of working too hard break your willingness to get into its world.  None of this numerical nonsense is essential.  Dash quickly to the other side of its exposition and “Anti Matter” makes good on the promise of packaging intelligence and imagination into a compact sci-fi thriller.

There are certainly far worse sins a movie can commit.  But if “Anti Matter” is guilty of any cinematic crime, it is doing more than required to add artificial suspense it doesn’t necessarily need.

Much of this forced flair comes from overly ominous lighting or a relentless music score that doesn’t know when to pipe down.  A strong story and highly capable cast are both equipped to do the heavy lifting on most scenes.  But “Anti Matter” really aims to puff up appearances with colorful smoke swirls shooting through venetian blinds and active audio that won’t stand for one second of silence.

The penchant for piling things on is truly seen whenever the movie adds another complication, whether for Ana or for the viewer.  The camera frequently frames attention on clues that don’t matter.  “What ifs” posit possibilities and “who’s thats” introduce people of ultimately irrelevant value.  There is nary enough food to feed all the red herrings in the story’s stream.

It’s satisfying enough to simply bathe in the moment alongside the movie’s mystery.  “Anti-Matter” doesn’t need this constant carousel making minds question how all of the pieces fit in.  That some of those pieces don’t fit at all puts salt on the scrape.  There then comes a point past the one-hour mark where movement stalls because breadcrumbs stop dropping, and the runtime repeats hollow beats.

As a critic and as a film fan, I recognize the hypocrisy of chastising a movie for putting in this much effort to entertain me.  I’m talking tough against “Anti Matter” because first-time feature writer/director Keir Burrows has the talent to be able to take it.

Even when shoehorning action sequences that aren’t motivated or serving up multiple misdirects to make the movie work, Burrows’ cheats always keep “what’s the biggest film I can make on a modest budget?” in mind.  This kind of indie ingenuity is not often seen in lo-fi sci-fi.  On successfully executed ambition alone, “Anti Matter” rates with “The Answer” (review here) and “Time Lapse” (review here), coming close to “Timecrimes” (review here) and “Primer,” as a twisty true identity conundrum that is enjoyably engaging, albeit imperfect.

“Anti Matter” bites off a lot that isn’t chewed all the way through.  Yet its integrity as a smart story and inventiveness as a motion picture make its overachieving attitude all the more endearing.

Review Score:  75

---