didn’t give the actress much space to give anything more layered than the archetypal high-powered publishing super-biotch. But Greer has always made a meal out of a morsel, and inIn the film, Greer plays Sophie, a grieving widow who lost her husband, Malcolm , in a drunk-driving accident, leaving Sophie and their daughter, Riley , achingly distant as they battle their pain.
When Sophie comes upon a machine that can change the course of her current life and end her family’s misery by killing someone else in the past, she reluctantly feels she has nothing more to lose. And thoughhas little in the way of originality or style, Moshe’s screenplay benefits from its focus, never reaching for too many lofty answers about the human condition.
Before any matters of space and time come into the picture, Greer is already commanding the film. Her expressions carry a heaviness that reflects the immenseness of Sophie’s loss and givesits necessary layer of believability, even when the film’s science-fiction component starts to falter. Malcolm does indeed come back to her, but while their reunion is emotional, it’s also burdened by the viewer’s suspicion that something very annoying is about to happen.
The effects of time travel on reality are a necessary component for any writer to examine when developing a film like this, but can typically be the most exasperating aspect. Ripples happen, people forget parts of their lives, things go missing, world and personal histories become worse—you get the picture. Having set itself up with an interesting skew on the genre,could easily lose all of that good faith with some obnoxious over-examination of the repercussions of Malcolm’s return.