97 min | R | June 4, 2021 | Lionsgate
Fred Fitzell has a corporate job, a dying mother, and a memory he cannot place. A high school drug called Mercury lets him slip sideways through time, and a vanished girl named Cindy keeps pulling him back. The trip is more interesting than the destination.
Fred Fitzell is a man with a comfortable job, a steady girlfriend, and a mother dying in a hospital bed. A chance encounter with an old classmate cracks something open. He remembers Cindy, a girl from high school who disappeared, and a drug called Mercury that bends time into something he can step through. Christopher MacBride builds the film around the idea that memory and identity are not fixed points but doors that swing both directions. The real subject is a man terrified that the life he chose was an accident he can still undo.
Dylan O’Brien plays Fred with a haunted commitment that holds the film together. He moves between corporate composure and chemical unraveling without losing the thread of the same scared person. Maika Monroe plays Cindy as the kind of memory that warps everything around it. She functions less as a character than as a wound Fred keeps reopening. Hannah Gross plays Karen, the girlfriend, with a grounded patience that exposes how far Fred has drifted. Liisa Repo-Martell plays Mrs. Fitzell in the hospital scenes, and those moments carry the only clean emotion the film allows itself.
MacBride directs and writes, and he treats the camera like a drug. The editing fractures chronology until past, present, and possible futures bleed into one another inside a single cut. Strobing light, smeared faces, and a low electronic drone push the sensory overload past comprehension and into assault. The technique is precise and the intent is clear. The problem is that the style works so hard to disorient that it stops letting the audience feel anything underneath the noise.
Flashback mistakes confusion for depth. The puzzle box is built with real craft and a genuine point of view about regret and the roads not taken. But the deeper it buries its meaning, the colder it gets. By the end the film has so thoroughly dismantled its own timeline that the emotional stakes evaporate, and a story about a man desperate to feel something leaves the audience feeling almost nothing.