How would our romantic lives change if science could tell us the precise day on which we'd meed our soulmate? That's the premise of Timer, a charming SF-meets-romcom indie.
You get the Timer implanted on your wrist any time after you hit puberty, and it counts down the days until you meet The One. So long, that is, as The One is also wearing a Timer, which Oona's apparently is not. She's about to turn 30, and her Timer is still blinking zeros like a defective VCR. She's been dragging every Timerless guy she meets to have his implant, in the hopes that he's The One, but that's getting awfully frustrating. When she meets a cute young drummer with 4 months to go on his own Timer, she decides that for once, she's going to have a cheap short-term fling and enjoy it.
Writer-director Zac Schaeffer does a nice job of putting her characters in a variety of Timer situations that allow exploration of the many philosophical possibilities. Which would be worse, finding out at age 13 that you won't meet The One for 30 years, or finding out that she's due in 3 days? Does knowing when you'll meet your soulmate make you more inclined to save yourself for him, or to sow a ton of wild oats while you wait?
The cast is mostly made up of relative unknowns, though the supporting cast has that odd mix of B-stars and ex-stars you often find in indie films (JoBeth Williams and Tom Irwin play Oona's mom and stepdad). Emma Caulfield stars as Oona, and her years on Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped to sharpen her comic timing, which is top-notch here; she's immensely charming and likable. Michelle Borth does a nice variation on the lovably trashy sister, and John Patrick Amedori as Mikey the drummer has you rooting for him (despite a terribly awkward first scene that does not present the character in a good way).
You'll see some of the plot twists coming well in advance, though there are a few surprises, and happily many of them come in the final act, which doesn't play out at all the way I'd expected. But even the more obvious moments are handled nicely, and Schaeffer has thought through a lot of the Timer's interesting implications. One detail I loved comes in the first scene, when Oona has hauled yet another beau into the Timer offices for an implant; we see the new Timer on his arm, then cut to her wrist, and the 15-year-old model she's wearing is larger and clunkier than his, clearly an earlier version. Timer is an impressive first film that should get Schaffer the chance to play with a bigger budget, and I'm curious to see what she'll do with it.
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