OtherLife (2017)

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Siskoid
It's hard not to think of OtherMindBenders when watching Australia's OtherLife, whether that's Brainstorm or Inception or, in with the specific premise of a prison stay inside one's mind, Deep Space Nine's "Hard Time", even if it is a pretty slick techno-thriller that looks better than its indie roots would have you expect. The gimmick is a programmable chemical that can give people instantaneous experiences/memories, but lead programmer Ren Amari is also trying to save her comatose brother with it. Things take a dark turn when she's forced to agree to a year of incarceration (one minute in real time) to test the product for the penal system and from there, well, you know how these things go. What's real, what's not, and we've seen enough of these to know what's what pretty much all the way through. What remains original is, I think, the way the experience changes her especially in terms of dealing with her brother's accident, playing with the metaphor of the "prison of the mind", and then the satisfying climax. The vibe is much more restrained than bigger budget head trips, but it has enough to say that it can stand on its own despite the derivative premise. 1 year 11 months ago