Plus One (+1) Film Review

 

Ugh. A mildly sci-fi flavoured chiller flick that bores instead of thrills, squandering its intriguing premise.

At a massive house party, things begin to get strange after a tiny meteorite strikes a power pole. The party begins to experience brief power outages, which spawn copies of everybody at the party. The copies, however, are from several minutes in the past, oblivious to the situation, performing the same actions and having the same conversations as the originals had only minutes earlier. Each time the power goes out, the time gap closes a little and the copies get closer in time to the originals. But what happens when they finally catch up?

Well you’ve got ninety minutes to find out. This movie moves slow. The first half hour comprises of poor character interplay at a pathetically try-hard house party (when booze, strippers, naked sushi and rave lights aren’t enough, there’s always indoor flaming ball tennis – complete with shoddy CGI). Once the copies turn up, things actually slow down even more, as the film spends a lot of time contriving excuses for the originals and copies to not notice each other for most of the movie. Only a handful of characters are aware of the situation (as always with this sort of film) as everybody else at this house party (with at least fifty people attending) are oblivious to the situation. And the characters that do know do very little about it, with some even choosing to just ignore the problem altogether (particularly the dickhead main character).

The main character, David, is one of those unlikeable protagonists these sorts of pseudo indie flicks are rife with. His girlfriend dumps him at the beginning of the film after catching him making out with another girl (a situation that just happens for no discernible reason other than ‘main character is an ass’). He still pines for her, and wants to use the party as an attempt to win her back (through giving a passionate speech, as TV has taught us). When the doppelganger situation arises, he uses it as an opportunity to convince her to get back together with him. But which one is he interested in catching? The original or the copy? Fuck it, he’s selfish enough not to care. Despite being the main character, he mostly just fills out the relationship side-plot, not concerning himself with the main conflict.

It all leads up to a weak, unsatisfying ending that attempts to provide an element of freaky ambiguity, but instead just feels like a bit of a lazy cop-out. The movie has nothing other than its premise, an interesting one it never really capitalises on. It spends too much time setting the scene than exploring its ideas, providing a weak sort of resolution to cap off a disappointing viewing experience.

For a horror movie (or at least thriller) it lacks in every department. There are no thrills or chills, there’s little blood and no gore, there’s a lack of atmosphere, personality, character – this is just sad. There’s some nudity and sex, and a brief bit of violence towards the end. Otherwise this is like the plot of a rejected Twilight Zone episode that got stretched out to fill a film.