Flashback Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Flashback Blu-ray Movie Review

Freddie Darko.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 1, 2021

If there were some cinematic equivalent of one of those sites like Ancestry or 23 and Me, some enterprising "genealogist" might benefit from exploring whether there's any shared DNA between Donnie Darko and Flashback's focal character Freddie Fitzell. Both films feature a troubled young man with an alliterative moniker who seems to be experiencing a pretty major mental breakdown, replete with what may (or may not) be vivid hallucinations, both Donnie and Freddie interact with a mysterious female, and both characters get caught up in a "holistic" plot that suggests that time, at least in its "traditional" linear formulation, is an illusion. For those of you who have considered Richard Kelly's (now) beloved film to be impossibly cryptic, some who have ventured through Flashback may be prone to answer, "You ain't seen nothin' yet." Flashback, again like Donnie Darko with regard to Kelly, owes its genesis to one man who both wrote and directed it, in this case relative newcomer Christopher MacBride. MacBride is on hand on this disc in a genial enough commentary which probably does answer at least a few questions, but which may not provide enough information to really ferret out all of the film's labyrinthine mysteries, which some viewers may actually feel is a good thing.

Both MacBride and Flashback have a lot on their veritable minds, to the point that when MacBride summarizes the film as "the story of a boy and his mother", some may be prone to laugh out loud. Fredrick Fitzell (Dylan O'Brien) is a guy on the cusp of turning thirty, who would seem to have just about everything any guy on the cusp of turning thirty would want, including a gorgeous girlfriend named Karen (Hannah Gross), a luxe apartment and what appears to be a well paying if mind numbing job as a data analyst at, as MacBride terms it in his commentary track, a "cubicle farm". The one fly in the ointment is that Fred's mother (Liisa Repo-Martell) is mortally ill and suffering from aphasia in a hospital bed. This sad situation seems to trigger all sorts of psychological trauma for Freddie, which includes nightmares and other visions that appear to harken back to Freddie's drug fueled days at a local school.

Flashback starts segueing seamlessly, if at times maybe a little confusingly, between Fred as a young adult and Fred as a teenager in high school, where he is attracted to a kind of "bad" goth girl kind of hilariously (at least for fans of Laverne & Shirley) named Cindy Williams (Maika Monroe). Cindy is part of a gaggle of people, including a kind of brutish guy named Sebastian (Emory Cohen), who are gobbling down a drug named Mercury, and unsurprisingly, Fred ultimately finds himself hanging out with them and ingesting the substance himself. In the "adult" timeline, Fred is haunted by images of something going horribly awry during a Mercury trip, and he reteams with Sebastian and another guy named Andre (Keir Gilchrist) to try to figure out what happened to Cindy, since she supposedly vanished after a night out with the boys.

Now all of this is rather deftly handled in its own peculiar way, but as MacBride himself mentions in his commentary, this is supposedly a story about "a boy and his mother". In that regard, the film is almost deliberately opaque, trying to offer a lesson in semiotics, the philosophy of language, and quantum physics that understandably may not pass muster with either the general populace, who may well be confounded beyond help, or "specialists", who may fault the film for obscuring things to the point that, kind of like Schrödinger's cat, things both make sense and are completely meaningless.

The underlying suggestion that Mercury breaks down the "doors of perception" to allow for a near Divine apprehension of time as an organic whole rather than a linear experience is awfully similar to a conceit informing Synchronic, but in that regard it's perhaps salient to note that the Roman god for whom the drug is named was not just the god of communication, but also of tricksters and, just for good measure, a kind of tour guide for dearly departed souls who need help navigating the nooks and crannies of the underworld. It sometimes seems like MacBride is more than aware of all of these strands he's trying to weave together, and if he doesn't quite succeed in his quest, it's still a kind of hero's journey in a way, and my hunch is Flashback may achieve the same sort of "cult cred" that Kelly's film ultimately was able to.

Flashback Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Flashback is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.38:1. In his commentary, MacBride gets into the vagaries of the pandemic and how that wreaked havoc with the release of the film, and perhaps for that reason, I haven't been able to find much if any technical data on the shoot online (the IMDb offers virtually nothing). One way or the other, this is an appealing looking transfer, at least if it's understood that MacBride and cinematographer Brendan Steacy intentionally opt for a "drugged out" ambience at several key moments. As can probably be gleaned from a cursory glance at many of the screenshots I've uploaded to accompany this review, a lot of the film is graded very heavily toward either blue or yellow, and in both of those choices when lighting is dim (which it frequently is), fine detail levels can ebb slightly but noticeably. In relatively normal, ungraded, moments, detail levels are often excellent (see screenshot 19). There is definitely a hazy, even murky, quality to much of the imagery, but that tends to support the unraveling aspect that Freddie is experiencing. Several interstitial "light shows" occur, especially as the film careens toward two timelines colliding with each other.

Flashback Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Flashback features an often nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. This is a film which wisely considered its sound design to be as important as its visual presentation, and there's an appropriately hallucinatory quality to things from virtually the get go, with breathing, snippets of dialogue and other effects wafting through the side and rear channels. There are also a few probably unnecessary startle effects delivered with little bursts of LFE. Certain sequences, like the scene where Freddie meets up again with Sebastian at a strip club, have good general ambience that fills the surround channels realistically. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout this problem free track. Optional English and Spanish subtitles are available.

Flashback Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Director's Commentary


• Deleted Scenes

  Scene 1 (HD; 00:52)

  
  

  Scene 2 (HD; 1:38)

  
  

  Scene 3 (HD; 1:29)

• Flashback Trailer (HD: 2:14)

Flashback Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're the type of viewer who likes questions more than answers, Flashback may be your cup of tea, with or without a dose of Mercury. The film is certainly ambitious, and in its own way rather audacious, but I'm not quite sure MacBride delivers everything he obviously set out to. Nonetheless, this is a really interesting effort that fans of everything from Donnie Darko to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: Season One may find intriguing. Technical merits are generally solid, especially a really well wrought audio track. With caveats noted, Recommended.