Breaking Infinity review – low-budget time-travel puzzler goes round in circles | Film

This British-made puzzle of a movie revolves around Liam (Neil Bishop), a young man who wakes up with amnesia in an eerily quiet hospital ward with stitches in his face and a big bandage around his head. He suddenly has a vision of an older man (Martin Bishop) dressed like a shepherd in a nativity play telling him to wake up. When he does, it’s as if he’s shifted to a different point in time, and the injuries are much less severe. The only doctor around is Emma (Zoe Cunningham), who helpfully explains he was exposed to an intense electromagnetic field that caused his memory loss, but when he starts bombarding her with questions she less helpfully insists that it’s best if memories come back on their own.

It turns out Liam has been working at a super-secret science lab on a gizmo that allows people to time travel. Liam, both the lead inventor and first guinea pig, has done just that, except it seems as if he’s come a bit unstuck in time as a consequence, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Or it might be something else: the science in this fiction is very muddled and consists of characters jabbering at speed about quantum fields and string theory while very cheap visual effects (reminiscent of 1980s Doctor Who episodes) helpfully signal when we make a temporal jump. Liam must work out not just what he did and what’s gone wrong but how to stop it in the first place before it triggers the end of the world. For some reason, an attractive valley in Wales is the location of the next big bang, which surely won’t please the local tourist board.

Generous souls might cut this film some slack and put its air of desperate shonkiness down to lack of budget, but that’s not much of an excuse. Shane Carruth’s Primer by contrast is a really smart film about time travel made on a possibly even smaller budget, which proves that good writing and plausibly speculative storylines don’t need heavyweight financial backing.

This British-made puzzle of a movie revolves around Liam (Neil Bishop), a young man who wakes up with amnesia in an eerily quiet hospital ward with stitches in his face and a big bandage around his head. He suddenly has a vision of an older man (Martin Bishop) dressed like a shepherd in a nativity play telling him to wake up. When he does, it’s as if he’s shifted to a different point in time, and the injuries are much less severe. The only doctor around is Emma (Zoe Cunningham), who helpfully explains he was exposed to an intense electromagnetic field that caused his memory loss, but when he starts bombarding her with questions she less helpfully insists that it’s best if memories come back on their own.

It turns out Liam has been working at a super-secret science lab on a gizmo that allows people to time travel. Liam, both the lead inventor and first guinea pig, has done just that, except it seems as if he’s come a bit unstuck in time as a consequence, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Or it might be something else: the science in this fiction is very muddled and consists of characters jabbering at speed about quantum fields and string theory while very cheap visual effects (reminiscent of 1980s Doctor Who episodes) helpfully signal when we make a temporal jump. Liam must work out not just what he did and what’s gone wrong but how to stop it in the first place before it triggers the end of the world. For some reason, an attractive valley in Wales is the location of the next big bang, which surely won’t please the local tourist board.

Generous souls might cut this film some slack and put its air of desperate shonkiness down to lack of budget, but that’s not much of an excuse. Shane Carruth’s Primer by contrast is a really smart film about time travel made on a possibly even smaller budget, which proves that good writing and plausibly speculative storylines don’t need heavyweight financial backing.