With studio projects abandoning Los Angeles as a shooting location, it’s the low-budget crowd that are still holdouts, presumably out of necessity. Futra Days is another in the line of esoteric films about overheated Angeleno creative minds that the pandemic seemed to encourage; the likes of the hermeneutic sci-fi Something in the Dirt or family found-footage He’s Watching. But running time-travel rings around a dysfunctional relationship, Ryan David’s sophomore effort is just a bit too infatuated with itself.
Jaded record producer Sean (Brandon Sklenar, looking like Chris Evans and Glen Powell spliced) is wondering whether a new crush on thrift-shop worker and aspiring singer Nichole (Tania Raymonde) will go the distance. So he signs up to a “happiness heist”: being catapulted into the future by an experimental time-travel clinic run by Dr Felicia Walter (Rosanna Arquette) whose medical qualifications seem, well, questionable. After replacing his future self, who is in the process of walking out on an exasperated future Nichole, he decides to try to reboot their relationship.
The opening is a kaleidoscopic blitz that sets a promisingly dislocated tone for what is shaping up as an Eternal Sunshine-style breakdown of disintegrating love. But it quickly degrades into a set of maudlin pity-party conversations; neither svengali Sean or his protege Nichole emerge clearly enough as characters to jump satisfyingly through the hoops of the big plot transitions. Sean crashlands back into the wreckage of their mutual contempt in the present, then appears to have some kind of Lost Highway-esque psychogenic fugue into another reality in which he is now the inferior partner living on her dime.
The chronology is sloppy and semi-logical, rather than artfully fractured; David overcompensates by lathering on a highfalutin philosophic voiceover, as well as gratuitous visual glitches and unnecessary stylistic fussing. Sklenar and Raymonde’s chemistry and deftly layered performances, as well as consistently sharp shot-making and editing, are a touch wasted on a film that can’t see the characters for the concepts.