A widow gets to reconnect with her husband.
TIL WE MEET AGAIN is used with permission from Jacqueline Elyse Rosenthal. Learn more at / jacqueline_rose7 .
A widow has become painfully lonely since the death of her husband. Looking for relief from her pain, she signs up for Infinite Horizons, a service that uses VR that will let her see her husband again.
The service is expensive, but the widow signs up after an intoxicating trial. But she soon discovers the limitations of the service and must say goodbye to her husband all over again.
Written and directed by Jacqueline Elyse Rosenthal, this short sci-fi romance examines both the grief of a happy marriage cut short and the ways that the grieving process intersects with emerging technology. Featuring spare dialogue, it nevertheless conveys lush, intense emotion, thanks to its romantic score and a richly textured, complex visual approach.
This approach at first sets up a black-and-white world at night, with the use of contrast and shadows creating a sense of isolation and loneliness reminiscent of early French takes on sci-fi, like ALPHAVILLE and LA JETEE. But that changes when the widow orders a trial of a VR service promising another glimpse of her late husband. She gets the headset, starts the service up -- introduced in a cameo by actor and TV host Howie Mandel, who plays the CEO here -- and is ushered into a whole new world.
The use of special effects here not only shifts the film into color but propels it into a whole new emotional register that is deeply romantic, connected and grandly poetic. It's a high contrast to the widow's ordinary world, which makes it no surprise when she desperately signs up for the expensive, full-service in hopes of spending more time with her husband. That service, though, shows the limitation of her virtual loved one, and perhaps the limitation of VR itself, as seductive and seemingly emotionally fulfilling as it seems in the moment. It certainly raises questions about the interplay of technology and human emotions, gently wondering how the depths of our feelings can be exploited by those that harness tech for profit.
Those questions speak to the sci-fi aspect of TIL WE MEET AGAIN, but at its core, the film is about the process of truly saying goodbye. As the widow discovers, it's not enough to share moments in the present, to be in the same time and space with a husband or wife, an illusion that VR enables. Marriage is a shared past, with its inside jokes, shared references, past histories and emotions. It's also building a future on the foundation of this shared past. The widow isn't just mourning her husband's absence, but their co-created future together. When she realizes this, she can say goodbye with peace and wisdom.
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