I love you, but you need help
Main Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Aldis Hodge
Director: Kourosh Ahari
Don’t get me wrong, I love intelligent movies, but sometimes you find a movie that makes you feel really stupid!
I was trying to find a movie on Paramount+ and was surprised at how few horror movies are streaming there. But I had several good choices on my watchlist and I had already watched a small handful of really stupid crap, so I picked the one that looked the most intelligent. I think I picked the right one.
Vanessa (Danielle Deadwyler) and Alex (Aldis Hodge) are at their family cabin with Alex’s brother Martel on the anniversary of their son’s death a year earlier. Vanessa had been driving when they were in a wreck, and she hasn’t been able to forgive herself since.
She goes out walking in the woods to get some alone time when she’s nearly attacked and killed by a woman who looks exactly like her. As Vanessa begins to suspect it was her, just from a different world—thanks to a visit from what may have been an alternate Martel—Alex tells her about some of his father’s crackpot theories about other worlds and traveling between them.
Then Vanessa meets another version of Alex who explains to her that his father wasn’t a nutjob, he was right; there are many other worlds out there, and the path to some of them is here in these woods. He’s been trying to find the path that leads him back to his home.
Aldis Hodge is a self-professed nerd (he played Hawkman in the BLACK ADAM movie and is Green Lantern John Stewart in several animated movies as well) and along with his brother Edwin (who plays his brother Martel in this movie) wrote PARALLEL with Jonathan Keasey, which is the smartest movie I’ve watched in a while. Does that necessarily make it better? Well, it kept me engaged for the entire runtime.
I love multiverse stories, the idea fascinates me to no end. And the idea of getting lost among the worlds and not being able to find your way back to your own world is terrifying. Soon Vanessa comes to see that while all the worlds have their own unique differences, they’re all similar in the way that hurts the most: her son is dead in all of them.
PARALLEL is so interesting, and director Kourosh Ahari (a producer on THE YELLOW WALLPAPER) keeps the story moving along at a great pace. Maybe too great, in fact; at some points I had a hard time figuring out from context clues which world Vanessa was in. Then again maybe that was a flaw in the script. Or maybe I’m just not smart enough to watch this movie. That’s very likely. This movie didn’t go way over my head, but I would have definitely had to reach up to touch it. Still, I dug it huge and I’m glad I picked it.
The Hodge brothers and Deadwyler all had excellent chemistry onscreen together and not for nothing I could listen to Vanessa and Alex talk about whatever happened to float into their minds, they both had such presence.
This isn’t a movie to put on in the background while you fold laundry and straighten up, but if you’ve got the time to devote to it, I highly recommend PARALLEL. You won’t be sorry.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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