Review of I'll Follow You Down (2013) by Jeff B — 24 Feb 2016

A wonderfully acted and well executed film with instructive ending. The cast is top notch with Anderson, Osmet, Garber, and Sewell giving solid performances. It's more than just another sci-fi, time travel film. This one has a lesson of lasting familial impact and import.

Erol discovers throughout the film that the amount of pain and suffering found at the loss of loved ones, especially those essential to one's growth--parents, spouse, and children--can find no substitute, no replacement. There is no life with such lack, such want. At the concluding scene, the son instructs the father as to significance, for here the father lacks the perspective and hard earned experience of the son. After so many years of living without father, losing his mother, and eventually his child, Erol is on a mission, that which is primary and exceeds all other wants, hopes, and dreams, but it takes great loss to discover this primary need. Erol sees a reconciliation, a fix to the pain he, his mother, and his wife experience. He has in his possession a scientific discovery that will set the world alight, one that would even exceed that of Einstein's theory of relativity, completing it even. But he gives it all up to reconcile his family, to end the pain and futility of familial loss.

But he is not easily instructed (that same lack of human ability to really "get it" is reflected in the father in the concluding scene). It takes considerable pain and loss to get him to push through to discovery of life's primary needs to make a scientific discovery that will aid him only in fixing that most essential want. He tosses his father's discovery of time travel into the nether regions of space with no regard for its significance to be reconciled with a most primary, critical need, of that which can never be replaced by any discovery, even that of epic proportions.

A wonderfully crafted and executed film.