‘Reversi’
“Time waits for no one,” Akid (Beto Kusyairy) says. Except for him, that is. He comes from a family in which people can travel back to the past. The mechanics are fuzzy but there are some basic rules, including the necessity to accept the inevitability of some events, no matter how much you try to prevent them, and the harsh reality that time travel takes years off your life, making you age faster. Those ground rules come into crucial play in Adrian Teh’s sci-fi melodrama, from Malaysia. Akid joins the police and marries Sarah (Shiqin Kamal), a martial-arts instructor; they have a child, Anas (Dzul Haziq or Danish Zamri, depending on Anas’s age). After tragedy hits the family, Akid tries to use his power to rewrite history.
Were this one of the many American films involving time manipulation, either through travel or loops, our hero would figure out a hack via repetition. Let’s just say that repetition in “Reversi” does not quite work out the way we’re used to, as the story is interested in a different set of moral and existential parameters. While the movie is, admittedly, a little overlong, Teh finds new gears at regular intervals, with a couple of plot twists that up the emotional ante.
‘The Last Spark of Hope’
After global warming and pollution have wrecked Earth, the rich and powerful have departed on starship arks for the interplanetary unknown — wandering in search of a livable planet somewhere in the cosmos is better than certain death at home. Eva (Magdalena Wieczorek) is still hanging on, living alone on a plateau above the toxic cloud that covers Earth. Well, almost alone: She has for company a military robot, Arthur (voiced by Jacek Beler), which stands guard over her compound — it even dutifully asks for a password when Eva returns from foraging expeditions. Then one day, Eva forgets the recently changed password and Arthur refuses to let her in, even though it knows very well who she is. She’s stuck, blocked from her shelter and supplies by what is, essentially, a bureaucrat stubbornly sticking to the rules.
The Polish writer-director Piotr Biedron manages to superimpose a framework of ecological devastation with the limitations and dangers of artificial intelligence. He makes the most of the single location, and stages Eva’s efforts to get back to her home base suspensefully. Since our heroine might well be the last woman on Earth, you might say the stakes are high.