With the concept of the multiverse all the rage these days, trying to squeeze something fresh out of it is, to me, a tall order. Even more so when your budget is limited and you can’t afford the special effects that turned something like Everything Everywhere All at Once into the visual spectacle that it was. But New Brunswick filmmaker Arianna Martinez certainly tries her darndest to do the most she can with less in her feature debut, and instead of mindboggling CGI and copious greenscreening, perhaps all that is needed to convey a sense of timelines violently clashing is some choice editing and a love story that is simple enough to be understood, but poignant enough to have the stakes needed to make her sci-fi conceits work.
This is more or less what she effects in Do I Know You from Somewhere?, which follows the ebullient Olive, who is happily married to her taciturn woodworker husband Benny in an isolated chalet in rural New Brunswick. On their anniversary, however, strange things start happening: Olive misplaces her anniversary gift and can’t remember what she had inscribed on it; Benny finds a stuffed bunny rabbit in his workshop, its owner unknown; a child’s magnets begin appearing at random on their fridge; and finally, after coming home from a walk, the couple finds a wooden wagon in their living room, without a clue as to who put it there. Interlaced with these occurrences are flashbacks to the first time Olive met Benny: at a wedding Olive’s sister brought her to, where Benny worked as staff and Olive had no one to talk to. Their initially awkward interactions blossom into a charming connection—but what about the woman at another table who tries to flirt with Olive before Benny sweeps her off her feet? What role does she play in the present-day mysteries that plague the couple as they barely hold on to their reality as it beings slipping away from them?
Martinez’s film takes admirable swings in what amounts, at the end of the day, to a character study of Olive and her desires—latent and burgeoning—as a bisexual woman and a mother. Caroline Bell’s performance (shockingly her first time acting on film) is what anchors the film’s emotional core amidst Martinez’s experimentations, which, while not always landing as intended, are nevertheless an intriguing conduit to the story’s central concerns. If the film does fail at anything, it is in strongly justifying Olive’s chosen timeline, more so because a pivotal character becomes a focal point far too late in the narrative and never quite shakes off initial suspicions of being either an interloper or dark terrorizing force (the character is neither of these things, but they are not developed sufficiently to be completely sympathetic, unfortunately). This makes the film’s ending a mixed bag, with the intended message coming off as muddled as some of the timeline craziness we experience.
There is ambition and verve here, though, that was difficult to resist. Perhaps I have an affinity for scrappy underdogs that dare to push boundaries a little.
Do I Know You from Somewhere? had its world premiere at TIFF in the Discovery programme on September 6, 2024.
The Lonely Film Critic 