TiMER, a unique blend of chick flick and sci-fi, screened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Starting out slowly, it picks up speed and depth and suddenly you are immersed in what is going on — and by the time the movie ends, you wonder what's really going to happen. While I loved it, the 'significant other' was bored for about the first 20 minutes, although by the end even he had to say it was not at all a chick flick but a funny, engaging movie.
Is your soul mate pre-determined? What if a clock could count you down to the very moment you meet your soul mate? In this not-quite-real version of Los Angeles, a revolutionary invention called the "timer" actually brings this idea to life. The timer is implanted in the owner's wrist and promises to accurately display the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the owner is to meet his or her soul mate — providing Mr or Ms. Right is wearing one too. It is not easy, nor is it foolproof, as Oona O'Leary (Emma Caulfield) finds out.
Added to the mix are Oona's family members, which include her mom (JoBeth Williams) and step-dad (who met via timer) and her stepsister Steph (Michelle Borth) who has the same birthday and is Oona's physical and temperamental opposite. While family and friends move contentedly through life with predetermined romantic fates, Oona seems alone and not so happy — her timer is blank — while Steph goes through life from one casual encounter to another because her timer has a countdown of about two years, which leads her to have flings without any commitments.
What's curious about this film is that it starts off with Oona being desperate and that's where it could lose a lot of people early on, but once Oona meets Mikey (John Patrick Amedori) and starts to see him not as a potential timer mate (which he is not: according to him, he's got four months left on his timer, which is actually a fake he uses to meet girls; and something that's barely touched on is that he's 22 and she's almost 30) but is nonetheless attracted to him, things get more interesting. Eventually she finds out that Mikey's timer is a fake and they split up. His justification for the timer was to give himself an even chance with women in the timer-obsessed world (which comes across quite clearly) and that he would never stand a chance to have a solid relationship without it. His fake timer removes the anxiety from any potential meet-up. Oona takes a page from Steph's book and thinks "why not a casual hook-up"? but starts to realize that his company and their relationship are genuinely making her happy.
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