My Fantasia Festival, Day 8: Faults, and Predestination adapts Heinlein’s “All You Zombies …”
On Thursday, July 24, I saw two movies. One hinted at the supernatural. The other was a surprisingly faithful adaptation of a classic sf story. On the surface, these films didn’t seem to have a lot in common. But to me they raised similar questions about free will, about how people change, and about whether one can really choose that change.
The first was Faults, which screened at 7:15 at the De Sève Theatre. Directed and written by Riley Stearns, it starred Leland Orser as a man who specialised in deprogramming brainwashed cult members; he was trying to undo the damage a mysterious group called Faults had done to a young woman (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who also produced the film). The second movie I saw right afterward at the Hall Theater at 9:45. It was titled Predestination and adapted Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies …” — the title, apparently, was changed to avoid confusion in the marketplace: the filmmakers didn’t want people thinking it had to do with the walking dead. It starred Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook in her first star role in a feature film. Much of the movie was taken directly from the story, the main changes being additions which helped the story work on screen — and which also ultimately challenged the original story, adding a new ending beyond Heinlein’s text.
I’ll start with Faults, which is in many ways an excellent film that does an awful lot right. It’s a period piece set (so far as I could tell) somewhere around 1980. I mention this because this decision affects both atmosphere and plot: there are no cell phones, no Internet. I’ve noticed a number of films at Fantasia set in the 70s or 80s and you can see the logic. The plot becomes simpler to manage. And you can evoke a time with props and costumes that are probably relatively cheap and easy to find. In this case I think it also taps into a fear of cults and brainwashing that was in the air in the post-Jonestown years.
