Review: '+1'

Watching Dennis Iliadis’s mind-bending new teen party flick ‘+ 1,’ it occurred to me: sci-fi can be a charmed genre. A premise trippy enough to create suspense and mystery can make bland characters feel incidental.

“+1” centers on David (Rhys Wakefield), a college-aged teenager living at home. In an astonishing lapse of reason, David shares a kiss with a girl who, moments earlier, defeated his girlfriend, Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), in a heavily attended fencing match. Jill sees the kiss and dumps the boyfriend. Soon after, David goes with his loquacious, sex-crazed friend Teddy (Logan Miller in easily the film’s most entertaining performance) to a high-octane house party teeming with college kids. David intends to find Jill and win her back. But shortly into the night—after Jill rejects David’s feeble attempts at apology—the lights and power shut down. When they come back, David and Teddy notice strange new people at the party: themselves, along with duplicates of everyone else there, enacting their same actions and dialogue from twenty minutes earlier. And, sometime later, when the lights once again flicker off and on, their doubles are enacting more recent routines. What will happen when the doubles catch up in time to the “originals?”

The film’s successes stem from its intriguing scenario, its mood and atmosphere, its mounting suspense. As the doubles get closer in time to the originals, and the oblivious, writhing mass of party-goers move inexorably closer toward standing face-to-face with their alternates, the film threatens chaos and violence, and the tension runs high.

But David is an exceptionally bland character. When Teddy suggests that David should have gone to college instead of staying home, David responds, “I like it here…I know where everything is.” “That sounds like what my grandfather said when he refused to go into assisted living,” Teddy jokes. The film sporadically hints that David may be on a journey to greater ambition, but that never plays out. He just wants his girlfriend back (to the point where he attempts to reconcile with Jill’s double after the original refuses to forgive him). There is not much else to know about him. And Wakefield’s static performance does the character no favors. His face is as unemotive as a wooden mask.

A major reason for the film’s acute suspense is cinematographer Mihai Malaimaire Jr., who recently photographed Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Master.’ Mihai is particularly effective at filming in tight spaces amongst closely-packed bodies, capturing a sense of claustrophobia and overpopulation. His camera skillfully foreshadows an inevitable mass confrontation between “originals” and doppelgangers.

“+1” is far from perfect. Fortunately, its mystery, atmosphere, cinematography, and mounting suspense of are enough to overcome its glaring weaknesses as a character story.

Read the review at IndieNYC.com


David@IndieNYC.com