Rent Sequence Break (2017)

Starts well ... - Sequence Break review by NP

This begins as a very appealing film about Oz (Chase Williamson), who meets Tess (Fabienne Thereze) – two happily ‘nerdy’ young people who love playing, and are very knowledgeable of, arcade games. Oz is games technician in a store due to be closed down, and they discover an arcade machine not seen before in the shop. As they play it against their better instincts, it displays unknowable powers …

That’s about as much of the story revealed without going into deep spoiler territory.

The genuinely delightful romance that blossoms between these two slightly eccentric outcasts remains the best thing about this. The horror elements, which straddle the kind of world HP Lovecraft wrote about and David Cronenberg directed, are unusual, bizarre, mostly unexplainable and increasingly fragmented.

The latter half of the film gives itself entirely to this strange world, and the story, such as it is, becomes redundant. This is a shame, because it seems to go nowhere, until an equally strange finale comes along and ushers in the end credits.

I applaud director and writer Graham Skipper for going for something different, but the result doesn’t quite satisfy, despite the naturalistic and appealing performances from the main players. My score is 5 out of 10, mainly for the first half.

Seems like it should be two separate movies - Sequence Break review by DD

Seconding the other review on this movie... it seems like a cut-and-shut of two separate films. On the one hand we have a cute nerd romance that could have been made into a sweet little rom-com of its own. And then we have a Cronenberg-esque horror that features electronics becoming weirdly organic and erotic. The ending feels perfunctory and as if the writer just ran out of ideas as to how to resolve the story.

Credit is due for trying something different, but overall it's a disjointed mess.