Tags: blog, film, action, thriller, recommended, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday April 28th, 2026
Oh boy!
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.Terry Pratchett The opening shot is of Irene in the middle of murdering someone. The next scene is also of her murdering someone. The third scene arrives without even pausing for breath and yet again, she's murdering someone. That's how the film tells us she's a good person. She's killing instinctively, quickly, with purpose. Irene is hopping through dimensions in what initially was a quest to find a universe where her daughter is alive. But on finding her murdered in every single one, enacts revenge on the man, the same man, who did it. She no longer seems to hold out hope of, well, of hope, and instead goes straight to the murdering part. Like an episode of Quantum Leap where the solution every single week is to murder a paedophile. This film differs from other multi-verse movies by pointing out that an infinite number of universes also means an infinite number of universes imperceptibly different from our own. It has a Groundhog Day like focus on grinding repetition, only here it's about a serial killer trying to avoid dealing with their grief. It's brutally efficient at showing the effect that numbing, relentless repetition has on a person. The violence, the shooting, the stabbing, the bludgeoning, the murder, isn't the problem. It's the obsessive yearning for something that can never be, refusing to confront the actual pain that you are going to have to live with. It's not really in the same league as Hamnet for it's empathetic portrayal of grief. For one thing the dialogue, although a lot of fun, has almost zero subtlety, the characters just plain tell you what they're thinking at every moment. The script is written for efficiency, not artfulness. But it hits incredibly hard in a few moments, that efficiency catching you off guard with it's swiftness and it's eagerness to cut right to the chase. The soundtrack is also brutally efficient. An electro boomer that matches the soundtrack of Sirat for chest-thudding, analogue bass wobble. A treat of a film that I'd recommend to literally anyone.
