Before I Fall English Movie
Before I Fall begins with its lead Samantha's(Zoey Deutch) pretentiously passionate words about life and how some people live the same day again and again. Even though, there she expresses a poetic idea, that is literally the premise of the film. Samantha is caught in an unexplained time loop where she actually lives a fateful day over and over again.
The idea of 'time loop' in itself is extraordinary. When a film decides to use it as a tool of storytelling, it gets even more scintillating as you are watching something close to a cinematic representation of a video game. The victim of a time loop feels exactly the same way as a person playing the same video game again and again. Except, for the character it is real and experiential. This human element is the selling point of such stories and not the fancy idea per se. In the past, Hollywood has given us cleverly fascinating films based on time loop with Groundhog Day, Source Code and The Edge of Tomorrow being popular examples. The only thing Before I Fall can claim as its own is where it plants its cyclical story- in a coming-of-age drama. Samantha is one of the most cliched characters one would come across these days; something writers of teen dramas always struggle to overcome. She is among the popular girls in her school and enjoys a fun life with her friends, occasionally falling into the "mean girl" tropes. This trope, though, is vital to the narrative and its on-screen implications eventually affect the arc of her character monumentally.
As the plot progresses from a patient setup to an audacious second act, the audience is promised a worthy reveal or message, purely by the seemingly upward quality of the drama. However, just by the sheer number of loops that are played through the duration of the film, we are acclimatized to all the visual and dramatic hints that we naturally anticipate a special something around the corner. Alas, the film gives exactly what the lay person would passively predict at about half an hour into the film. If that is not depressing enough and you were wondering what the point of this 100-minute house of cards was, it screams out the feather-light, ultra-preachy message to "be the best of what you are and do good". Little do its writer and director, Maria Maggenti and Ry Russo-Young, respectively, know that such morals are appreciated better as bumper stickers in today's world. The annoying voice-over narration from Samantha only takes things further downhill and punishes its creators for choosing the oldest trick in the book as exposition.
For a time-loop based film, with immediate curiosity garnered comes the burden of outsmarting the audience with the storytelling. Before I Fall skips all the difficulty of telling a thought-provoking tale with its unique formula and instead resorts to cheap melodrama. Had it not taken itself too seriously, the audience could have switched their brains off and gained some value out of it. The self-obsession of the story and its central character prevents all good things from happening. What we get in the end is a train wreck of a film that insults our intelligence like, well, there's no tomorrow.
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