Crew
Director/Screenplay – Sam Odlum, Producers – Tessa Mansfield-Hung, Sam Odlum & Alexandros Ouzas, Photography – Marcus Cropp, Music – James Orr, Visual Effects Supervisors – Murray Curtis & Gene Hammond-Lewis, Visual Effects – UI Design Animation & UnityFX, Prosthetics – WowFX (Supervisor – Danielle Ruth), Production Design – Bianca Milani. Production Company – Umbrella Entertainment/Exile/Lex Neville.
Cast
Freya Tingley (Denise), Charles Grounds (Johnny), Elisa Jansen (Tracey), Joshua Morton (Kane)
Plot
Johnny and Denise are crystal meth addicts. They go to the dealer Kane to get a hit on credit. In return, he asks them to do a job for him – to break into a house and steal a duffel bag of drugs. They break in and take the bag from a sleeping man. However, they soon find strange things are happening – the walls are smeared with blood and someone has placed chains across all the exits while they were not looking. Johnny takes one of the crystals in the bag and finds himself transported back to 1995. There he is forced to become the love slave of former undercover detective Tracey. After encountering herself in the house, Denise uses the crystals to go back and rescue Johnny only to find they are trapped in a temporal conundrum where Johnny has become her own father.
Time Addicts was a feature-length directorial debut for Australian director Sam Odlum, an expansion of his earlier 13-minute short film Time Addicts (2020).
Time Travel themes have gained increasing sophistication throughout the 2010s. The film that started it was Timecrimes (2007), which wound back around itself in multiple layers of closed causal loops with a good deal of clever sophistication. This was followed by the likes of Looper (2014), Black Hollow Cage (2017), In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) and Bodies (2023) doing similar cleverly contorted things. Australia has produced two of the finest among these temporal conundrum films with The Infinite Man (2014) and the Spierig Brothers’ Robert Heinlein adaptation Predestination (2014), both of which could be said to form part of the essential DNA of Time Addicts. There could also be a dash of the drug-induced time travel we saw in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Synchronic (2019).
It takes some way in for Time Addicts to engage. In the initial scenes, the two central characters seem like losers, drug addicts who are constantly bickering with one another, that it is hard to engage with either character. (In my experience, the two actors also seem far too clean and healthy to be actual addicts without a penny to rub together). The whole premise of “crystal meth addicts find a time-travelling drug” premise put me off initially and it ended up being some time before I got around to watching Time Addicts. The entire film is economically contained within the single location of a dingy rundown house with only a couple of other places visited throughout – the empty lot and the laundry at the start and the visit to the future in mid-film.
Just when you are ready to dismiss the film, there is the sudden point (about 50 minutes in) when Time Addicts pulls itself together and starts getting clever. There is the rather hilarious scene where Freya Tingley returns to rescue Charles Grounds who has spent six months in 1995 as the sex slave of Elisa Jansen only to realise that Elisa is Freya’s mother and that must make Charles her father. This pushes the incest theme of Back to the Future (1985) to another whole level where Freya and Charles are boyfriend/girlfriend – the film never quite comes out and says it but gives you the distinct impression that that is what they are when we meet them – before upending this is an amusingly twisted way.
From this point, Time Addicts starts to find the cleverness of these other temporal conundrum films and began twisting about on itself, producing other revelations, even scenes where Freya Tingley meets a temporal double of herself, before later scenes where we see her enacting the very same scene from the other side, as well as cleverly explaining who put up the chains and all of the other pieces of the puzzle. It is never a conundrum that gets quite as clever as Timecrimes, The Infinite Man or Predestination does but it proves an amusing little puzzle that Sam Odlum delivers.
Trailer here