"Minor Premise"; Eric Schultz's Debut Trips a Consciousness Rift
6/12 ForReel Score | 2.5/5 Stars
Minor Premise is a heady, ouroboros of a film; an interlocking, overlapping puzzle of the mind, in which a single person’s brain matter becomes simultaneously our only narrative frame of reference and our greatest impediment in understanding the narrative. The debut film from director Eric Schultz, who previously co-produced such well-decorated indie films as James White (2015) engages what Schultz calls a “highly subjective cinematic style” to plunge us headlong into the many-chambered, fractured psyche wrought by a neuroscience experiment gone wrong and turned too personal. The result is a feverish, science-based psychological thriller that is at once both engrossing and frustratingly obtuse.
Sathya Sridharan stars as young neuroscientist Ethan Kochar, a man who, after mysteriously receiving a notebook containing a much-valued formula, retreats to his dingy basement laboratory to complete a machine dubbed the “R10” that will allow him to achieve “collimation” and capture “true consciousness control” (think of it as quantifiable self-actualization). Always sweaty, disheveled, and sporting a thousand-yard stare, Ethan manages to split his consciousness into ten distinct personalities, some of who continue his work, while others conspire to sabotage him. Caught up in the fray is Alli (Paton Ashbrook), who is roped-in to assisting Ethan out of an unclear professional-personal obligation, as well as Malcolm (Twin Peaks alum Dana Ashbrook), who oversees Ethan’s funding.
Minor Premise is less concerned with the external, “real-world” pressures of Ethan’s life, and as a result, a character like Malcolm is under-utilized and unfortunately relegated to an afterthought in the story. Even Alli, who is introduced as a potential anchor for Ethan, never really has her relationship or function in Ethan’s life elaborated on beyond a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-them flashbacks of intimacy, and this severs a much-needed emotional thread at the story’s core. The sole focus, of course, is Ethan’s torturous ordeal as he wrestles with his own corroding self, who multiplies not into distinct identities (not into the dissociative identities that we may recognize from other films, anyway), but into the fractured components of his “default” self – his aggressive side, creative side, etc. The idea is an engaging one, and it is imbued with the clearly passionate eyes of both the director and writers Thomas Torrey and Justin Moretto. Adroit editing techniques also turn this film into a uniquely spasmodic and disorienting experience, with cutaways to abstract representations of Ethan’s fizzling mind bringing an almost primordial, soupy texture to the film fabric. The film languishes, though – particularly in its final third, when it starts forgetting to remind us what’s at stake and starts running out of ideas, ignoring the clear depth for exploration afforded by the filmmakers’ educational pedigrees.
Minor Premise is bolstered by an enigmatic performance from Sridharan as Ethan, but it is the film’s script that never lets his character truly express itself amidst the dissonance, even as so many of his character’s traits are literally noted down on a chalkboard for us to analyze. The problem lies in the lack of a resonant emotional heft, mentioned earlier, that is unable to reinforce the memories plumbed by Schultz, nor the memory of this audience.
