watched for 2-2-'22...a very fitting recursive groundhog day indeed! 2-minute review: this is an amazing little indie sci-fi film that was made for $125,000 in real guerilla style. i looked up the details afterwards and was so impressed by what they pulled off when they had no effects, no permits, no equipment, no nothing. for me it shows that a great script and strong performances win out over a slickly-produced movie any day. this is nearly a two-hander between the imprisoned frank (christopher soren kelly) and his assistant/warder howard (jesse d. arrow), who he only hears as a voice over the intercom. we start with frank waking up in the cell, trying to find out from howard why he was imprisoned and what happened. through flashbacks, conversations, and dreams, the story unfolds to offer surprising layers to what initially appears to be a very contained (har har) film. this is a film that does not waste a single detail and has a lot to say, much of which probably went over the heads of anyone who saw it on netflix and lumped it in with their other budget sci-fi acquisitions. it is far better than those, for many reasons... ---------------------------------------------------------------- for the real cinephiles: i watch groundhog day or another sort of time loop movie every year on this day, and i had started running out of good ones. i wish i could remember where i read about this one, because it's relatively unknown and criminally underseen...that writer needs a raise. the looping aspect doesn't fully emerge until nearly halfway through, and doesn't technically involve time travel. but then, who's to say groundhog day was actually time travel? the important aspect is that our main character is trapped in a cycle and has to figure his way out. in this case, he has very limited resources, and the writer director (travis milloy) is also very clever about limiting what the audience knows at any given time. there are points in the story where we're not sure if characters are truly revealing what they know, or if what we're seeing is actually reality. all this is anchored by two really engaging performances by kelly and arrow. arrow in particular is great at giving line readings with just subtle differences in each repetition, which gets really impressive in later scenes. without spoiling anything, i will say that the film clearly wants to draw parallels to many real world dilemmas, and i really appreciated that. frank's father was kept alive on life support for years, and part of what frank thinks about in prison is the quality of life his father must have had. his basic needs taken care of, yes, he was technically alive. but as the one who kept those machines pumping, was frank not like a prison warden for his father? and on that note of accountability, there are clear parallels between frank's situation and us "black sites" like abu ghraib. frank is not charged with a crime, not given any legal representation or rights. it's fine because he's "being processed"...and how many years will that "processing" take? meanwhile he's subjected to mind games and manipulation in an effort to secure information from him that will prove his guilt. the film knows that someday someone might condemn all this, but how does that help frank while he's imprisoned? it does a great job at making viewers empathize with someone in this situation in a way that they might not when it's a brown man accused of terrorism like in zero dark thirty, a film so many people bought into the propaganda of. and of course, there are other aspects like the kafkaesque frustration of being caught up in a system which is designed to insulate its architects from any responsibility. there is the reverse-heist drama of someone desperately trying to figure a way out of imprisonment, like in the shawshank redemption or the great escape. there is the stockholm syndrome type bonding in isolation like in another great sci-fi indie, moon. and there's that classic feature of time loop films: how can you use the looping to do something different and escape from your predicament? infinity chamber has all this going on, and more. it will probably draw the most comparisons to christopher nolan films, not because of how it's shot (the cinematography is, at times...not good) but because of the story structure. it's a film like memento or inception that reveals new details as it develops that make you question what you understood before, all the way up to the end. but it's striking in how it does so much more, so much more tightly, compared to a big budget effort like interstellar. it comes down to having a script that is imminently believable and doesn't ask you to believe in any pseudo science or that love is a tangible energy source that powers the universe. this film is simply a gripping and shockingly well-made micro-budget movie where every piece fits in its perfect place. not really light entertainment, but i'd have no hesitation recommending it to anyone.