REVIEW: LAMINA

LAMINA, the lastest feature from the mind of writer/director Wolfgang Lemkuhl, is a sci-fi noir/thriller with a dash of black humor. Actual more than a dash, and while it's certainly no comedy, the film is pretty damn amusing.

The story follows David (Daniel Probst) a kind of hard-working everyman who spends his days sanding marble and hardwood floors, and his nights sitting outside of his ex-wife's loft yearning for the life he once had. This humdrum routine is interrupted by the mysterious Stephen (Reynard Fox) who saves David from a potential mass shooting in the bar that he frequents.

This chain of events leads David down a weird, trippy, time-travelling rabbit hole because Stephen is a time travelling...fixer... if you will, tasked with making changes in the timeline, writing small wrongs and ideally making the world a better place. Or something like that.

Stephen then enlists David to help him take on various jobs, with David wondering if he can possibly fix his own past mistakes- with potentially catastrophic results. The film is reminiscent of Nolan's early work, with morally ambiguous characters and a twisting, turning, out of sequence plot.

Shot mostly in black-and-white, with a few splashes of color here and there (very well used, by the way) the movie is a tour-de-force of rock solid acting and dialogue. While the FX in the film are few and far between, they work well in the context of the story and with a PRIMER-like simplicty really sell it as a time-travelling sci-fi story.

The entire cast from top to bottom is uniformly excellent, but Probst and Fox really nail the assignment, giving some of the best indie acting performances I've had the pleasure to see in a long time.

The film is long for an indie, clocking in at close to two hours, but director Lemkuhl keeps things running in a tight way that has you engaged until the very end. Over ten years in the making, LAMINA is a fantastic indie noir that was worth the wait and definitely deserves a watch.