Customer Ratings & Reviews

Opening with the cryptic murder of an elderly woman by a near- identical individual, this film fast-forwards years later, when the Seattle house where the murder happened is now occupied by young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, who face a deadline to come up a revolutionary new app (due to a former partner abandoning them). Resigned to their dreams being ruined, they discover, by chance, that the house has a hidden staircase and attic which contains an antique mirror possessing odd properties, its non-solid surface allowing passage to another version of the attic, but an attic in a parallel universe its inhabitants identical to the tech team, yet unaware of the attic, the mirror, or the travelers between worlds. (Yes, *worlds*--there are an infinite number of them, and future trips through the mirror by the team never put them in the same world twice.) These worlds, their unique appearances the result of individual choices in the past (usually only artistic decisions--not worlds with big changes, such as JFK surviving, for instance), also experience slow passage of time, compared to the world the entrepreneurs come from, which lets them to hang out in those worlds and develop their app tech before the deadline, resulting in their raking in millions overnight. Not content with their financial gains, a few of the would-be Elon Musks push the envelope, using the gate to other realities to find and sell tech ("second generation e-readers" or nasty, futuristic-looking weapons) not yet invented here, stealing the financial resources of their other selves, seducing counterparts of women who wouldn't give them the time of day here, or--in the case of the one woman on the team, a starving artist--finding art that was never painted in our world, and replicating it for display in an art gallery. In the face of all this ethically-questionable use of the potentially dangerous gateway, one member contemplates the unselfish use of it to find a world where his deceased father--played by David Harewood from Homeland and Supergirl--is still alive, so as to make peace with him. (He angrily disowned his father after learning of his business scandal, driving him to suicide.) Ultimately, the team's bad karma comes back to haunt it, the tragic consequences tearing down the old spirit of cooperation that made them a winning team, and the mood gets ugly. And the worst part is that some of the team members aren't through pushing ethical boundaries. Let's just say that when someone looks at an infinite number of human counterparts as nothing more than replacement goldfish, you may want to avoid the folks who made that observation. This film isn't a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's an unsettling way to spend an hour and a half, nonetheless. The one thing that bugged me about the ending (no spoilers) is that it seemingly dropped an unexpected surprise in the audience's lap in the last few minutes, even after loose ends were supposedly wrapped up. I could make an educated guess as to what happened, but it was still annoying. That's the only thing that keeps me from giving the film five stars.