EIFF 2014: The Infinite Man

When anal-retentive Dean (McConville) brings his girlfriend Lana (Marshall) to the desert motel where they once enjoyed a perfect anniversary, his desire to repeat the past exactly sees him having to repeat the past differently. The Infinite Man’s title refers to the loop Dean gets stuck in as he uses a time-travel device of his own making to try and disrupt the strange events that end his relationship, causing different versions of himself and Lana to both aid and sabotage each attempt.

This Australian film could easily (and lazily) be described as a romantic comedy version of elaborate time-travel works Primer and Timecrimes, or as ‘Looper in love’, but writer-director Hugh Sullivan’s smart and sensitive feature debut deserves special credit for hinging its conceit on successful emotional beats, never letting its structural ambition get in the way of its fun character arcs and some terrific laughs. Kudos, too, to Sullivan and his great leads for further showing up the emotional bankruptcy of Richard Curtis’s About Time.