‘Sign Here’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
The rom-com/sci-fi subgenre is on a roll. For a nice date night double bill, you could do worse than pairing the very funny “Molli and Max in the Future” with this bittersweet take on dating and relationships. The Mexican director Enrique Vázquez’s debut feature is set in a near-future when common wisdom holds that relationships last four years before souring. Whether or not couples still get along by that point, they split and people look for another partner. Getting ready to embark on a new contract, as relationships are now called, Fran (Regina Blandón) makes up answers to her matchmaking questionnaire, which messes up the algorithm. She ends up being paired with the sweetly dorky Roque (Leonardo Ortizgris), even though they don’t seem to share much. But maybe love is not based on perfect sync, after all, and maybe it can last longer than four years. Or can it?
“Sign Here” creates a realistic world in which getting to know someone is simultaneously very simple and very complicated. But the movie’s best trick is to make us just as invested in what’s going to happen to Fran and Roque as they are.
‘The Animal Kingdom’
In a rare feat for a genre production, especially in France, Thomas Cailley’s fable-like tale earned 12 nominations at the 2024 César Awards, including for best film (it lost to “Anatomy of a Fall”). This is a testament to the overall excellence of a movie that feels as if François Truffaut and Jean Cocteau had decided to collaborate on a hybrid of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
And “hybrid” is the perfect word here: We are immediately plunged into a world in which some people have started turning into animals. François (Romain Duris) and his 16-year-old son, Émile (Paul Kircher), move to a new town in the south of France to be near their wife and mother, who has been put in a specialized center after she mutated and attacked Émile. Soon, however, the teenager realizes that his own body is beginning to change. Cailley doesn’t explain how this all began and doesn’t get lost in practical details, either. Instead, he focuses on the human element, turning “The Animal Kingdom” into an allegory about difference, and how we handle those who are other. It’s no spoiler to say that acceptance and ostracism duke it out, though that makes this haunting movie sound more didactic and heavy-handed than it actually is.
‘Latency’
The professional gamer Hana (Sasha Luss) makes a meager living by testing beta versions of new products at home. Partly it’s because she’s good at it, and partly it’s out of necessity because she has acute agoraphobia and doesn’t go out. One day Hana is sent a new headset that’s powered by A.I. and — after extensive calibrating — capable of connecting with her brain waves. When plugged into her computer, it gives the gifted Red Bull-guzzling geek the ability to bypass the keyboard and pretty much play games telepathically. Naturally, this reduced latency, or lag, gives her a huge advantage in online competitions. But it also further disrupt her already fragile psyche.
James Croke’s film is a single-set model of efficiency in that it takes place entirely in Hana’s apartment — or perhaps in her head. As Hana’s sense of dislocation gets worse and worse, fans of psychological horror may be reminded of the 1965 Roman Polanski movie “Repulsion,” in which Catherine Deneuve loses her sanity, even if “Latency” is nowhere near as brilliant. More prosaically, anybody alarmed rather than excited by our blind enthusiasm for brain-affecting gadgets may find their concerns freshly renewed. Hana may not have been the most stable person to be given such a device, but the gizmo is still deeply disturbing. And it feels as if we’re only a heartbeat away from it being available in three pastel colors at the nearest Apple store.
‘I.S.S.’
The International Space Station may be orbiting above Earth, but it’s not cut off from our planet’s affairs. Shortly after she arrives to conduct experiments, the American biologist Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) finds herself dragged into the global crisis that has erupted hundreds of miles below. The United States and Russia are at war, and the I.S.S. crew’s six members, which are equally divided between the two countries, receive stark orders from their respective home bases: Take control of the space station “by any means necessary.”
The director Gabriela Cowperthwaite tends to overdo the foreshadowing, but her tight little space thriller makes good, unfussy use of its claustrophobic, gravity-free environment. It also doles out a fair number of plot twists and red herrings as allegiances shift and agendas are exposed. DeBose acquits herself well, anchoring the film with an unassuming confidence, but the secret weapons on “I.S.S.” are Pilou Asbaek (“Game of Thrones”) as a Russian and John Gallagher Jr. as an American, who are more complicated than they appear.
‘The Abandon’
Besides time loops, “random person wakes up, usually alone, in an enclosed mysterious location” has to be one of the most common themes in under-the-radar sci-fi movies: After all, it’s a scenario that’s fairly easy to pull off on a limited budget and shooting schedule. Directed by Jason Satterlund (whose unauthorized “Star Wars” short, “Kenobi,” was a YouTube sensation a few years ago), “The Abandon” centers on Miles (Jonathan Rosenthal), a soldier who is wounded on a Middle Eastern battlefield, passes out and wakes up in an empty room. At seemingly random intervals, the room tilts on its axis and throws him this way and that, as if he were in a washer-dryer. The walls also move, closing in on him. And then his satellite phone rings. On the other end of the line is the voice of Damsey (Tamara Perry), a middle-school algebra teacher who’s held in a similar room somewhere.
Both prisoners see cryptic messages appear on their walls, and together they try to figure out what’s going on. As the film progresses, the tone switches from pure science fiction to something more like psychological drama as Miles and Damsey become closer to each other. It’s hard to say anything about the ending without spoiling it, so let’s just say that the payoff is somberly rewarding.
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