Intersect (Horror Movie Review)

PLOT: When a trio of Miskatonic University students invents the world’s first time-travel machine, unforeseen consequences of evil abound.

REVIEW: With two short narratives (THE GIRL IN THE WOODS, QUANTUM REQUIEM) and a full-length documentary (THE UNBELIEVERS) to his name, writer/director Gus Holwerda steps out with his feature debut INTERSECT (WATCH IT HERE / OWN IT HERE), a torpidly protracted and wildly disjointed time-travel attempt mired in a morass of melodramatic misgivings. With a whiff of amateurism across the board, unconvincing CGI, and a nonlinear storyline that raises far more brow-raising questions than satisfying answers, this wannabe Wellsian/Lovecraftian love-letter ultimately does not deliver a shred of novelty to the subgenre, nor does it provide requisite chills as it slowly regurgitates themes and images from far better movies. The film wants to be a cerebral cinematic puzzle piece, but tonally offers all the gravity of a mid-season Flash episode crossed with a dose of The Outer Limits. So unless you’re a sadomasochistic glutton for punishment in serious need of a migraine, skip INTERSECT at once when it drops on VOD September 15, 2020.

The film opens with a montage of crypto-cosmic alien imagery that promises something that never fully comes to bear, at least not convincingly. The next fifteen minutes of the film could be excised altogether, as a string of confounding and poorly executed activities in a campus laboratory do nothing but disorient the viewer to the point of drumming up instant disinterest. I realized that is part of the intention, to confuse the viewer at first, but everything about this movie is way too long and drawn out. We finally meet our three leads – Ryan (Jason Spisak), Nate (Abe Ruthless), and Caitlin (Leeann Dearing) – young scientists doing research at Miskatonic University, a fictional institution in the equally factitious Arkham, Massachusetts. The next 45 minutes is spent dully depicting how these physicists have created the world’s first time-travel machine called Quantum 42 (Q42), which is far too redolent of STARGATE’s sectional metallic archway. A few mice get liquefied before the right modulation proves successful for physical matter to be transported through space-time.

Of course, since the movie is about jumping around in time, the narrative unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. Although Caitlin seems far more drawn to Ryan, it isn’t until an hour into the film we learn she is actually romantically involved with Nate, who is a drunken attitudinal goofball who thinks it wise to have a few cocktails and try to become the first human being in the history of mankind to successfully time travel. The results are not only predictable, but they’re not scary in the slightest as a well of poorly rendered CGI hits the screen in ways that hinder, not augment, the intended terror. From here, the film jumps backward and spends an inordinate amount of time with the three leads as high-school students. The movie careens into a halfhearted treatise on school bullying as Ryan, Caitlin, and Nate study quantum physics with their influential teacher Mr. Marshall (James Morrison). This overlong middle section ultimately devolves into a sobbing melodramatic bore, replete with funerary tears and sad heart-to-heart confessionals that lack emotional resonance and thoroughly derail what little interest the movie had to offer to begin with. There’s also a misguided religious subplot that is shoehorned into the proceedings that also feels superfluous at best.

As for the plaudits, I can say with a modicum of confidence that the movie improves in the final 30 minutes, but there’s no guarantee your attention span will allow you to make it that far. And if and when it does, the characters remain cold and distant enough to not give much of a damn what the outcome is. Also, the chintzy SyFy-level CGI shows its ugly head the most during the final reel, which, while more action-packed and entertaining, is ultimately less convincing than when we’re shown hints of the time-traveling monsters earlier on. I normally grant a lot of leeway for a first-time director with limited resources at their disposal, and this is obviously a low-budget indie affair. But the best way to say it is that, for a feature debut, Holwerda has bitten off far more than he can chew, delivering a needless, overly-muddled two-hour movie out roughly 45-minutes of actual story. Nonlinear time-travel movies are a challenge for even the most skilled directorial craftsman, so in that regard, Holwerda may have been a bit too ambitious with his first feature.

All told, INTERSECT takes far too long to arrive at its intended destination, failing to deliver enough spookiness and authentic intrigue along the way, while suffering from a slew of amateurish first-time filmmaker choices at every turn. The film wants to be a time-bending, mysterious sci-fi/horror outing in the vein of H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft, but also wants to be anti-bullying homily, anti-religious screed, and worse yet, a TV-level melodrama that, when all cobbled into one presentation, feels like a jumbled mess. The suboptimal performances and technical inferiority of the low-budget production don’t help matters any. That said, I do want to see what Holwerda has up his sleeve provided he hit the set next time out with a more focused screenplay.