Review of The In Between (2022) by Pabloretana — 22 Feb 2022

Tessa goes to a movie house to watch a foreign film only to find out there are no subtitles. She complains to the projectionist and gets no answer (no surprise there since she couldn’t even be bothered to stand up from her seat).

Skylar, the only other member of the audience, decides to get up from his and sit next to Tessa. “You watch. I'll translate”, he says. (Supposedly) three hours later (at the end of which his voice isn’t the least bit hoarse), she is bawling and clutching his hand (later on she will say that “I remember every word that he said to me”, which presumably means she has committed to memory the entire dialogue of a three-hour long French movie).

It's like, how much more contrived could this meet cute be? And the answer is none. None more contrived. But then this is a very contrived movie; it opens with “a very bad car accident” involving Tessa, who is informed by a doctor that “You ruptured your heart due to trauma”.

In other words, her heart literally broke. Awww. Well, what can you expect of a movie so unsubtle that it includes a scene of the leads kissing while fireworks go off in the sky above them? The film has an annoying habit of showing us know how many days before the accident everytime it flashbacks.

This information is as arbitrary as it is useless – except for letting us know that there have elapsed, give or take, 80 days between Tessa’s and Skylar’s first encounter and the second. This second meeting, mind you, is pure happenstance, and yet she takes advantage of the opportunity to return Skylar’s cap which he had left at the theater.

Soooo, are we meant to believe that she’s been carrying this particular item of headwear around with her everywhere she goes for almost three months? Contrived, I tells ya. It’s no spoiler to say that Skylar dies in the accidente because that’s the whole point of the movie – yes, this is yet another entry in the interminable list of films which, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, assume that even after death we devote most of our attention to unfinished business here on Earth, and a loved one left behind is more important to a ghost than the infinity it now inhabits.

In this case, Skylar is spending his after hours “in the in-between. But he won't be there for long, a few weeks at most. And when he moves on... he's gone for good.” First of all, good to know time is still measured in weeks – and by extension in days, hours, etc.

– in the great beyond. Second, Tessa is revealed these insights by Doris, who writes books on the afterlife; how she, never having been there, knows all this, is a matter left to speculation.