By David Dent
Low-budget time travel sci-fi movies can be a tricky beast. Directors have the dual problems of encouraging audiences to suspend disbelief with little funds to spare and telling stories that by their very nature can have the capacity to confuse and alienate if not handled well.
Luckily Marianna Dean’s feature debut Breaking Infinity (whose title admittedly does sound a little like an oft-quoted line from Buzz Lightyear) handles both these hurdles with aplomb.
When we first meet Liam (Neil Bishop) he’s all bandaged up in an otherwise empty medical facility with little idea who he is or how he got there. But soon we’ve been introduced to Liam in a number of different scenarios and timelines, encountering Emma (Zoe Cunningham) along the way, who may be just a nurse, or something more intrinsic to the story.
As the film unfolds we learn that Liam is involved in a complex scientific experiment to achieve time travel (with the usual added pressure of the top brass demanding results, and lots of timey-wimey explanations, as per with this sort of thing), which has somehow gone awry, trapping him in some kind of quantum loop, the end result of which, as evidenced by glimpses into the future, could trigger the end of the world.
Using a script by David Trotti, whose CV lists over 30 years of credits in various capacities, Breaking Infinity unveils its core story slowly but carefully, echoing the loops of time described in the narrative. Bishop and Cunningham make for a watchable and increasingly believable pair, convincingly building their roles as the audience understands more and more of what’s really going on. This is a smart first feature from Dean and a great addition to the British Fantastic Film canon.
Breaking Infinity will be available on Digital Download from 3rd July and can be pre-ordered here
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