Counter Clockwise is being marketed as a mind-bending sci-fi dark comedy thriller, and it is all of those things, unfortunately in its efforts to do so much it doesn’t really excel at anything in particular. The film is directed by George Moise and written by George Moise, Walter Moise, and Michael Kopelow. Michael Kopelow is also the main protagonist of the film, Ethan, and along with the Moise brothers is responsible for many elements of the film from production design to casting and camera work, and it shows. Counter Clockwise ends up feeling like the product of a small group of talented individuals that had a good idea for a film, then locked themselves in an echo chamber and didn’t come out until the script was finished. The result is a hodgepodge of ideas and aesthetic choices that could be very effective in another context, but never really manage to coalesce into something cohesive.

Counter Clockwise is the story of Ethan (Michael Kopelow), a brilliant scientist that used to work for a major tech company but has since gone independent, his assistant Ceil (Alice Rietveld), and their one-eyed dog Charlie (Charlie). I wish I could tell you more about these characters, but we’re given very little to go on with Ethan spending the majority of the movie looking confused and befuddled as he reacts to the strange situations he finds himself in and Ceil not being given much to do other than react to Ethan’s stories. While working on your standard. run-of-the-mill instantaneous matter transporter one day, a couple of wires get fused introducing “a new variable” into the system and creating a time machine. In terms of handwavy explanations of the mechanics of time travel, I have to give them credit, this is not one I’ve heard before. After a test run on the dog, Ethan decides to try the machine out for himself and finds himself in a dark future. A fugitive from the law for the murder of his wife and sister along with being hunted by Rakubian, his former employer, and Syndicate Red (which I believe is a flavor of Mountain Dew), two powerful tech giants with an interest in his teleportation technology.

The setup is intriguing, the acting generally quite good, and the production values are easily above average for an indie, but here is when things start to go off the rails, due to an oddly-paced and tonally dissonant script along with some perplexing editing choices. The pacing is a real issue, with a meandering second act that does little to tie up any loose ends, leaving most of the story development to the last 30 minutes which becomes increasingly cluttered as the film struggles to construct a coherent narrative out of multiple intersecting timelines with numerous copies of Ethan, each with their own motivations arising out of an incomplete understanding of this world they find themselves in. Add in a corporate espionage plot that the viewer is kept in the dark about up until the climax and things start to feel incredibly rushed as the film attempts to both introduce and develop plot threads in the right at the end to compensate for doing very little narratively the majority of the film. Ideally one would expect a mind-bending film like this to leave clues about what is going on throughout, but Counter Clockwise is so heavily backloaded that by the time you have any idea what’s going on you’ve probably already stopped caring.

The characters in this one really left me scratching my head. They include a henchman that gets turned on by kidnapping Ethan and threatens to rape him, the boss of one of the organizations who is introduced with a speech about whether it’s better to wash your hands before or after you urinate, and a dwarf that stares at the screen for awhile because we needed some padding to stretch this thing to 92 minutes. This is clearly where the quirky dark comedy angle was intended to come in and maybe in some other film some other version of these characters could have worked, but not here. The issue emerges from both the fact that the dialog doesn’t feel organic and these characters don’t seem to belong in this world. This isn’t Alice in Wonderland where everyone is a bit kooky and it all makes sense tonally, this feels like an ordinary world and we simply keep encountering escaped mental patients. This leads to the world simply feeling inauthentic and negating any investment the viewer might have otherwise developed. The acting really isn’t to blame here, with most of the cast doing a fine job with what they’re given, but there is only so much they can do to breathe life into these bloated caricatures.

The bizarre choices continue with the visual direction. The majority of Counter Clockwise looks quite nice actually, with some great lighting and composition. The cinematography and set design both show a level of finesse that is commendable for their modest crew, but this is hampered by editing choices that seem amateurish and self-indulgent. The worst culprit has to be the long fades to black that permeate this film and seem to exist as a replacement for organic scene transitions. Characters will be in one time and place one minute and then following a 5-second fade to black will suddenly find themselves in another time and place like the film entered into some sort of cinematic fugue state. Other strange visual choices include a driving scene with an obvious green screen that is inexplicably in black and white, jarring camera angles, and the arbitrary use of visual filters. It almost feels like they weren’t confident enough with how the film ended up looking so they felt the need to spice things up by making these conspicuous editing choices, but the end result is a lack of visual restraint that is more distracting than it is alluring.

Counter Clockwise has a lot of elements that work, but it throws too much at the wall that little ends up sticking. The team behind the film clearly has talent, but they really could’ve used some external feedback to rein in some of the more outlandish choices made. Doing so might have made the film feel more grounded and resulted in a characters and a world that would have been easier to invest in. One of the bigger sins a filmmaker can commit is to remind their audience that they’re a watching a film, and that is a feeling that Counter Clockwise never quite manages to shake. If you’re not a big sci-fi fan this might be worth checking out for your occasional sci-fi fix as the dark humor and thriller elements are at the forefront, but fans of the genre have seen this sort of story done so much better that I doubt many will find it worth their time.