In short: Shifter (2020)

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Theresa (Nicole Fancher) had to give up on college and every future she hoped for to take care of her sick father. Now, after his death, she’s isolated and lonely, working a crap job in a factory, living on the failed farm where her father died and she grew up. Struck by depression and social anxiety, and frankly surrounded by very few people who’d be worth anyone’s time, her only joys in life are her cat and the time machine she has built in her barn. Though she apparently doesn’t love the cat so much she’s not going to use her as a test subject for her device.

When the kitten comes back in one piece, and Theresa herself gets pretty angry after yet another excruciating encounter with the outside world, she drunkenly decides to test the device on herself next. The time travel bit certainly works, but somehow, her test has unmoored Theresa in time completely, so that she jumps back and forth in irregular manner, her body slowly dissolving in the process.

Jacob Leighton Burns’s Shifter seems to be a rather underappreciated movie, unfairly so, I believe. It is clearly made on a shoestring budget, but it is the kind of movie where a low budget means focus, not shoddiness. So it is well shot, visually thoughtfully composed, and clearly the sort of film that knows what it wants to be about and the feel it wants to have. It also knows how to achieve what it set out to do, and goes about its business with confidence and just the right amount of style.

It is rather a pessimistic movie, where all of our protagonist’s attempts at finding a life where she can be happy are disrupted and destroyed, all her attempts at fixing what she has set in motion are doomed to failure, and she is not just doomed to die but to a kind of unmourned total dissolution, at best turning into the ghost from her own childhood ghost stories. Obviously, the film’s not just talking about time travel accidents but about the way when decisions you couldn’t have avoided making the way you did can lock you into an unhappy course for the rest of your life. About how destructive forces of depression and anxiety can feel – sometimes actually be – as inevitable as the laws of physics, especially when you’re poor, and how failed attempts at breaking out of cycles that oh so clearly aren’t good for you can lock you even more into your own private trap. How much fun a film about shattered hopes is to watch is of course another question, but then, fun’s not always the point.

Though Shifter, particularly in its early stages is actually pretty fun, too, the kind of fun that needs to come before the hammer truly falls to make it hit harder.