Mark's Secret to Eternal Life

Look at the User ratings link. Notice all the 10 star ratings to balance out the number of 1 star ratings? Yeah, the reviews and ratings have been astroturfed :( Which always indicates a particularly horrid movie and it plays true to form in this movie.

The acting is high school level at **best** and after 30 minutes you will realize that Marks secret to eternal life is watching this disaster of a movie because it will seem to go on forever (Spoiler Alert). Thirty minutes of this trash was all I could take. The film Director needs to be strapped to a chair with his eyelids forced open a la A Clockwork Orange and force to watch this crapshow on infinite repeat until he breaks down and recants his is bad career choices and promises to go back to his Walmart greeter job for the rest of his life.

It is hard to find the adjective and nouns to explain how this movie left me. If I call it Sci-Fi, I would be wrong. Similarly, if I pegged it Horror, Drama, Mystery or any other genre, I would be wrong.

This is a movie that slowly creeps up on you. Until you realize, as Mark's character did, that you are in too deep and there is nowhere to go.

There are a few things to say: the acting by the two principals was mesmerizing, the director molded each character, each scene with a clarity one rarely sees, not even in the most ambitious independent projects.

Here the storytelling was the central core, and it was told well. Set aside any observations over any of the special effects, they were far and away the least important aspect of the story.

It was a story with so many layers, all within a simple premise of achieving eternal life. I challenge anyone to find a similar movie. Anywhere. That was told this well.

I won't delve into the story, because that would ruin the entire experience. Suffice it to say, that I highly recommend it to anyone who is searching for a film that will leave you thinking about all of the layers this very director/writer has created.

Give it about 15 minutes before you give up on it.

And yes, it's very indie. Only saying, because people show up on sites like this and criticize a picture like this like it has, quite literally, a fifty million dollar higher budget.

The two leads are pretty good here, and they have great chemistry. For a near feature length, I think I think they are fabulous.

There are aspects I don't fully understand, some semi- nude (but not personal) bodies I could live without, but nothing graphic, so no biggie.

I can't say much about the plot without ruining the movie, but it is a slow starter, once you get about 15 minutes in, it picks up. but it is still a relatively slow film. This is a very strange film, and I feel like it is one of those stories that deserves a sequel that it will never get. It really introduces this unique take on parallel universes, it is more of a fantasy film than anything else as it is not rooted in reality at all, it has it's own rules, many of which are not fully explained because even the characters don't know the answers, and by the end you will be left with many many questions that won't be answered and you can only guess at.

The acting, other than from Mark's girlfriend Catherine(who is barely in the film thankfully), is quite good. The two leads are both very convincing, even if this wasn't a low-budget film they would still hold up. The lighting is generally well-done, the sound is good, the very few effects utilized are very well-done. I don't have much negative to say about it on the whole, other than I wish it were 10 minutes longer and we knew a little bit more about the main characters, the unanswered questions are perfectly fine, but it could really use a few more moments of backstory for the Mark particularly, we know enough to care some, but it could be a bit stronger in that department. All it would have taken were a few more flashbacks.

It is definitely a philosophical film, and since it is a pretty short film, I am likely to go back and watch it again just to catch all of the little nuances that it contains. It touches upon a lot of ethical and moral questions, and I cannot get into them without spoiling the plot, so if the plot synopsis sounds interesting and you like films that make you think and are low-budget, it is worth a shot.