Shifter (2020) User Reviews

So much squandered potential...

[paul_haakonsen · 4/10 · 6 August 2020]

"Shifter" from writer and director Jacob Leighton Burns was definitely not your average run-of-the-mill time travelling movie, for better or worse. There were some very interesting aspects to the storyline, to say the least.

Now, "Shift" is a semi-slow paced movie, to be honest, and it is because of the fact that you feel as is very little is actually happening throughout of the course of the entire movie. A fact, actually, because not all that much actually did happen in the movie.

I liked the part of the time travel, how one body becomes unraveled by the fabric of time as the other replace it. And it was definitely something very interesting in terms of originality from writer and director Jacob Leighton Burns.

Nicole Fancher (playing Theresa Chaney) carries the movie quite well with her performance. I am not familiar with her work, but I was pleased with her performance in "Shifter". And I also enjoyed the performance of Ashley Mandanas (playing Blake Douglass), even though I was fully unfamiliar with her prior to this movie. Just a shame that Ashley Mandanas wasn't given more screen time.

The special effects in the movie were good, and they definitely helped bring the movie to life on the screen.

Ultimately, it was the fact that so very little actually happened in the movie that made this movie suffer. And for me, it turned out to be a less than mediocre movie experience. Especially since there was so much potential readily available to be used here in the movie. It felt like writer and director Jacob Leighton Burns simply skipped on too many aspects of the movie or failed to delve deep enough to make it interesting.

My rating of "Shifter" is a mere four out of ten stars. I was disappointed with the pacing of the storyline and the fact that it actually feels like an incomplete movie.

Barf-O-Rama

[lammi · 5/10 · 16 March 2021]

I've never seen barf be so central a theme as in this movie.

Just how many times does she have to throw up?

[thcrane-83961 · 3/10 · 23 August 2020]

This movie just jumped around too much, and I don't know why they thought it necessary for the character to throw up so.

Don't even waste your time

[red-nevermore-smith · 1/10 · 6 February 2021]

As a fan of indie film I'll watch anything, But then you get burned like this. Good premise, but bad acting, bad directing and miserable writing. The director has an eye for cinematography but he can't direct an actor or tell an enjoyable story. Bad writing is the worst culprit. I watched the whole thing as a fan of the time travel genre, I didn't even get a descent paradox, just silly reasoning and lazy writing to get us to the special effects scenes. Also worst time machine ever

The best part of this one is the movie poster...

[rsvp321 · 7 August 2020]

...and it appears to be copied directly from 1982's "The Thing".

When it comes to sci fi movies, I don't need the cgi and special effects to keep me interested. Just give me a thought provoking story. I can even get past her time machine made out of an old oil drum and toaster parts.

Unfortunately, this one makes zero sense, has zero message, a flatline from start to finish.

Just odd looking people that can't act, a very large dose of misandry, and we watch the lead character throw up *thirty-one times*! What's more annoying than that is her "cute kitty" cartoon voice she does seven times.

Not even good enough for background noise while you multitask.

Great Premise. Unwatchable Execution.

[nb-19881 · 2/10 · 7 August 2020]

Functional Sci Fi movies make sense internally and have a sense of cohesiveness. This one doesn't. At all. Because a young girl can assemble a clock, we are asked to accept the fact that she, as a young adult, can make a time machine from barnyard parts. No mention of HOW time travel or shifting is possible, what the method is, or how it was discovered, etc.

Then we shift into incredibly wooden acting and even worse dialog. Like a high school demo reel, if that.

Then it's on to fits of fast-forward (on my part) to see if there's anything worth watching.

And there isn't.

You have been warned.

More Wokeness

[Natasha266 · 5/10 · 7 August 2020]

Imagine being a writer/producer with a warped vision of the world, i.e. men are bad. Then you create this cheaply made time-travel movie using a very odd-looking woman who works at an all-female warehouse and whose encounters are other odd women at the library but bad men at the bar. Either we have a woke opportunist as author/producer or this is really what he wanted to portray. Take a man's story and adapt for women because this is the time we live in right now.

The only reason I gave it a break=even score is because it has some gripping element. You will watch this without twitching for your phone or wondering what else is going on. I can stipulate how important it is to hook the viewer and keep them watching. This is why I ended my Netflix subscription. I started getting bored and they become to feminist woke.

Please watch "Source Code" after this. It will be like mouthwash for your brain.

Such a Disappointment

[themooseisloose-18470 · 2/10 · 7 August 2020]

Reviewing films isn't easy, but making them can't either. So how do you earn a decent amount of backing, come up with an interesting concept, and have some directing/writing experience for a film to come out this bad? A horror time travel movie that feels like an 1980's Cronenburg film could be something that would be awesome and entertaining as well. One of the earliest flaws is the pacing. The first twenty two minutes and forty nine secomds sets up our lead and her mundane life. From there, she travels two hours backwards to go back to the date she had so she can destroy the front window. That is the pace at which the film takes to get to the action. I personally don't like the effects for the impact shifting. They look fake beyond belief and the lack of budget shows. On the hand, Peter Jackson Sam Rami, and George Romero had low budgets and made great films so this can't be a valid reason why. The acting is alright. The supporting cast is more interesting than the main lead which is frustrating because we're stuck with a tabula rasa that isn't given very much character development for the audience to care. I genuinely feel bad for the backers who funded this, because it couldn't have been worth waiting for a film like this.

HORRIBLE

[dreamcandi76 · 1/10 · 20 August 2020]

She goes back in time ONE time & the rest is her feeling sick & coming apart. Boring and depressing!

Lack of.. anything and everything that makes a movie A MOVIE.

[jazztitan · 1/10 · 9 August 2020]

This was an extremely hard movie to sit through. I stopped halfway through to start writing this review, but forced myself to finish it to be fair to the movie.. And I'll tell you the last 10 minutes was the only thing worth watching. This 90 minute movie could have been a 20-30 minute film, but needed to be dragged out on nonsensical buildup.

The gripes I have can be broken down into five parts - the acting, showing instead of telling, character goals and motivations, the representation of men, and the plothole because of it.

First off, the acting is terrible. I'm not familiar with this actor, but she's essentially supposed to be playing an awkward person, who doesn't have any friends and struggles talking to people. Now, being awkward and smart are the ONLY two character traits this girl has. The only person she does talk to is her cat in this over-the-top way that is extremely annoying and cringe, to where you need to fast forward past it, because it goes on for 10-15 seconds and it's the most horrifying part of this movie.

Second off, as someone else pointed out, one of most important rules of film-making is showing your audience proof - not telling them through narration. The film opens with a dark screen, and the main character telling us that she fixed a toy when she was a child - because she realized that she could fix it. And because of this, we're now expected to accept that she built a time machine. Where did she learn to do this? The narrator just told us she's super smart, so accept it. How did she do it? That's not the point. Why did she do it? ...That's never clarified. Because she realized she could?

Which brings me to the third gripe - the main character has no goals, no motivation. She's a plank of wood that built a time machine with no motive that tells us why she built it. She never does anything to develop her character with it. It's established that her father has died not too long ago - and that's about it. Was she building the time machine to go back to her dad? Well.. no. Was she building it because he said she couldn't? Well.. that doesn't make any sense, but no.

----- Spoilers from here on out. ------

Which brings me to the fourth point. This is a female led movie, which I normally don't have a problem with, but so many movies are putting it in your face that it's a female led movie, rather than just making a movie that doesn't revolve around that. There's a total of 4 male characters in this movie, and they're all established to be terrible people.

The first one is a man at the bar, who sits with her for a only one moment before he starts touching her and says that they should go back to his place to have some alone time. When she rejects him, he scoffs and tells her off, and the movie is very in your face about it.

The second male character we meet is an old friend from high school that calls her and asks if she wants to go on a date while he's back in town. During the date he is shown not caring about anything she has to say, and doesn't even listen to her - he leaves to go make a phone call and when he comes back, his wedding ring falls out of his pocket. Furious, she leaves.

The third male character is only briefly shown, and I don't even know what the problem was. the only thing I can gather is that her father used to work at the diner, and that because her father was sick this male manager had to fire him - and subsequently led to unpaid medical bills that may have led to his death, to which the manager didn't attend the funeral. So she's unhappy with the manager.

The fourth male character is also briefly shown - a male doctor. By this point, she's used her time machine, and is now a walking bowl of rice crispies, and she goes to get it checked out. The male doctor writes her off as having stress, because she's a woman, and he knew it was stress before he even walked in the door.

Now, these are the *only* male characters that have any lines that are onscreen for more than 15 seconds. All men are terrible!

---

The fifth reason this movie didn't work for me, is the plothole. So she builds the time machine, and confirms it works by testing it on her cat. It's a shame it didn't kill the cat, then I wouldn't have to hear the "ootchy-woo" voice again. She goes on the date with the second male character, and this is when she uses the time machine. She comes home, furious that he lied, and goes back in time 2 hours to hide in the trunk of the truck to vandalize the guy's car while they're on the date. A perfect alibi. But when the guy shows up, she sees him take the wedding ring off and put it in the car - so she smashes in his window, take the ring, and plants it on him when he steps outside to make a phone call so that it will fall out when he gets to the table.

But wait a second.. How does that even work? The only reason she went back in time is because it fell out of his pocket in the first place, which you're now saying is because she went back in time to smash his car window and take the ring to plant it on him.. it doesn't work.

great lack of horror but it is an...

[ops-52535 · 5/10 · 8 August 2020]

Experience, and what made them never reaching the most horrifying goal of making a real horror movie is for me an open question to ask. it has nothing to do with the acting, because nicole and cast do a good job, was it the money.

it a kind of ''the fly'' conceptual movie, where the main has built a machine that can make you shift in time and place, a timeshifter you can say, but thats it. it does shift again and again, but the the sum of the shifting is not as deteriorating as you may wich from the genre.

its also a story about mental health, pretty introvert i may say, and there are a lot of uncharted sexuality, sadness, locked- outishness, extreme loneliness and an extreme case of multifobia.

there are really no good ending to this edition, i guess it will develope into a sequel hopefully more horrifying than this was. its playtime at about 90 minutes felt very slow thinks the grumpy old man. if scify-timetraveling nerd, have a look, just a small recommend from the grumpy ,still searching for the fountain of youth,old man

Creative approach to the time travel genre

[mvinhogan · 8/10 · 10 August 2020]

I haven't seen another time travel movie that took a horror approach to the genre. Really solid for a low budget indie film.

A dark movie

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 29 January 2021]

When Theresa Chaney (Nicole Fancher, Unchained Love), a socially awkward woman, emerges from a time travel experiment, she soon learns that she is shifting through the timestream out of control. She tries to keep this malady a secret, but as she keeps shifting more and more, she has less control. Even worse, even her entire existence begins to unravel.

Shifter is written and directed by Jacob Leighton Burns, who has dreamed of making films since the third grade.

While this film does not have a huge budget, it does have plenty of ideas, as well as a non-heterosexual romance at its core without coming off like that was an idea just to get press. It all feels very natural, as natural as a movie about a woman dealing with grief misusing the ability to travel through time can be.

The final shots of this film are harrowing and bleak. It's rare to be able to generate that type of emotion and this movie pulls that off with aplomb.

um

[dion_pangallo · 1/10 · 9 August 2020]

Yeah um $30k budget and a facebook page?! n please.

so scary !

[roger_2020 · 9 August 2020]

One of the best horrors I've ever seen. This movie destroyed me mentally and physically. After just 15 minutes of watching the film, I found myself sweating profusely and crying like a baby at the end. 10/10

A slow woke mess...

[stumpyswood · 1/10 · 5 March 2021]

A word of advice to today's filmmakers and screenwriters... Make a movie that you want... not a movie that fits into all of pigeon holes that the woke society has created and is trying to force onto the rest of tge world.

Not sure why I gave it 2 stars

[staunton-gary · 2/10 · 10 August 2020]

Basically, somebody decided to remove one of the T's from the movie title and replace it with a F, the original title sums it up much better.

Concept was interesting enough to me to give it a go. It doesn't deliver, and you can see where the budget went.

I guess that we are stuck with the Covid-eos until the movie theaters open again and the blockbusters get released.

Time travel ain't always on your side

[jonyen · 9/10 · 8 August 2020]

Before you make a time machine kids, check out this movie as a salutory lesson. And also, all l those budding directors whose movies are streaming during lockdown and who, for the most part, I want to strangle, check out what you can do for 30 large.

Maybe it was the uncontrollable (and surprisingly unannoying) compulsion of Nicole Fancher's character to speak in an "ootchy wootchy" cutesy voice whenever she saw a cat (or a picture of one) or the clever use of a non linear story line (is there any other one in time travel flicks?), but this was a Covid time indie movie that held my interest.

Great art direction, reasonable special effects, convincing performances and feel of growing fear and dread made this engaging throughout. Although much is revealed, there is not much explained in this film: who is this woman and why is she building a time travel device out of an old PC and a 44 gallon drum? And what happens to the cat? A great rhythm develops with enough human interaction to stop you feeling cold as a viewer. I see a great future for Nicole Fancher and writer/ director Jacob Leighton Burns: imagine what they could do if they actually had a budget that was more than most movies' "trendy chemical amusement aid flakes" spend.

If you like dark, clever, moody flicks check this out. You will learn, to paraphrase Fancher's character, why quantum physics is not a fun hobby, its a curse.

Mountains of potential in a sea of mediocrity

[sabrewolf84 · 6/10 · 2 February 2021]

This film seems to be getting some fairly brutal reviews, but I think it might be because this is an especially difficult film to review as and entire package because there are so many conflicting layers to it. Conceptually, you have an incredibly unique and inventive cautionary tale about time manipulation, but the narrative is repeatedly dragged down by too many bland, poorly conceived, and unrealistic characters, given to actors who can't make the poor dialogue and awkward scenes work very well. Then you have really solid visual and sound editing, with some very passable ultra low-budget special effects to keep the story going. Despite all the failings of this film, it's important to consider the budget they had to work with, and time of production; which was seemingly none in both cases.

For fans of unique scifi, especially inventive takes on time travel, I highly recommend giving this film a shot for it's overall concepts and production, but keep your expectations on performances and dialogue especially low to make your trudge through the film much easier.

Wouldn't call it a horror, but well shot

[jamestkinard · 8/10 · 12 August 2020]

The cinema quality is really good, and it keeps you engaged. The premise takes a while to happen, and majority of the movie appears to remain in a state of build-up. Yet, it's a pretty decent small budget indie film, that really gets interesting towards the back half of the movie in a good way. Nicole Fancher (Teresa Chaney) plays a socially awkward wiz kid type of character a little too well, and that's a compliment to her efforts. Although, everyone in this film comes off as a little socially awkward to some degree, which was a little off putting at times.

I was also quite impressed by Ashley Mandanas (Blake Douglass; she's a very strong actress.

All and all good movie; a worth watch.

Time traveling has a cost

[Stanlee107 · 6/10 · 18 August 2020]

This is an intriguing film whereby a woman creates a time traveling machine but it is unconventional.

At first she is enjoying the time traveling but she realised that it has a cost that she may not willing to pay...

You route for the antagonist & by the end you sympathise with her... The ending leads you to think that if you could time travel would you accept the baggage that goes with it. It does reference Back to the future but this is a more bleak & thought provoking in that it focus on the other extreme of this spectrum...

I don't understand the negative reviews.

[chimchiiimney-26773 · 10/10 · 10 August 2020]

Jealous fellow indie filmmakers, perhaps?? Lovely twist on the usual time-travel film. Great performances, especially by the lead--career-making turn IMO.

Great premise / weak story

[mkranes-1 · 6/10 · 4 September 2020]

Shifter anchors itself in really captivating premise: time travel as a morbidly dangerous endeavor. The premise is logical and believable. If one were able to travel in time, why wouldn't this dare devil feat result in horrible accidents with our bodies? It's a great premise for making a time travel movie that feels more like David Cronenberg gross-out horror. This is what hooked me into watching the film.

The film's shortcoming is we never understand what drives the main character, the young woman who invents the time machine and travels in it. We never really see her as a scientist: inventing the machine, tinkering with it. She never shares with us or anyone one WHY she has created this machine, other than an opening voice over about how she liked to take apart music boxes. Since she has no friends, other than her cat, no close colleagues, and no close family members, she never shares her internal world with us. She doesn't even share it with her cat. She is a mystery, a closed book. Since we don't understand who she is, it becomes hard to root for her. Or even root against her.

What we are left with is watching her suffer the physical consequences of time travel. Again, a great premise, but in this case, not a great story. She endures her physical maladies and pain - she vomits, she bleeds, she vomits more, and she bleeds more (and repeat) - but her efforts to solve the crisis are near non-existent.

The film ultimately for me became a bleak exploration of loneliness and helplessness. The main character's physical deformities take on a psychological component. When she finally becomes emotionally vulnerable and kisses another women - the best scene in the film because there is real emotional connection -- her physical maladies take over. The time machine sickness is not going to give her a chance at real intimacy and connection. It's a depressing message.

The film was a bit more enjoyable once I let go of trying to understand how the time travel worked. The how and why she travels is largely unexplained. And it requires a heavy dose of suspension of disbelief as to how she created it in the first place. We're told she's smart, but we never really see her be smart. Other than checking out books in the library on quantum physics.

If we knew a little more about who this character is, what her past is, why she is so emotionally blocked, what drove her to make the machine, what are her hopes and fears, the film would be far more interesting. Time travel could be a very apt metaphor for personal change. She is trying to change, to shift, to become something else, to go somewhere else perhaps. The biggest letdown of the movie then is that she really doesn't.

Thought Provoking

[PersonWhoLikesMovies · 10/10 · 10 August 2020]

Very unique low budget time travel movie! More character-focused than typical sci-fi fare, but keeps your attention with creepy atmosphere, intriguing visuals, and complex characters. Won't be for everybody, but those looking for something very different and unconventional won't be disappointed!

Interesting no-budget sci-fi

[jtwright-02770 · 6/10 · 27 December 2023]

Shifter currently sits at a 3.6/10 on IMDb, which is unfair to all the good qualities of the film. With a rating like that, I was ready and expecting to see something really awful, poorly shot, and cheesy. Shifter is none of those things, and it's actually quite good. Overall,

Shifter is definitely not a bad film. It's well shot and has a creepy pace with a downer ending. The performances are quite good too, which is especially impressive considering these are mostly local unknown actors. It certainly feels bigger than it really is. However, it's just a bit too slow; i appreciated the slow pace and the quiet ambience of the film, but after a while it just gets boring. Shifter feels more like a short film that was unsuccessfully stretched to feature length than it does a film that feels natural at 90 minutes...not even 90 minutes at that.

I enjoyed enough of the film and it certainly utilized its microbudget extremely well. I'd like to see what this creative team could do with a larger budget, but the budget was clearly not an issue here. Most of my problems had to do with the writing, which costs no money to perfect.