In writer-director Christopher MacBride's Flashback, listless office worker Fred Fitzell (Dylan O’Brien) discovers that he may have become unstuck in time as an aftereffect of an experimental drug he took when he was a teenager, but the mind-bending plot amounts to less than meets the eye. Rather than discovering the hidden secrets of the universe, Fred just learns some trite life lessons about appreciating what you have. Along the way, MacBride confuses and frustrates the audience in a way that seems to actively discourage investment in the characters.

As Flashback opens, Fred is living a dull but stable life. He's just moved into a nice new apartment with his pleasant and supportive girlfriend Karen (Hannah Gross), and he's been hired for a job in data analytics at one of those generic movie corporations whose main purpose seems to be holding meetings. It's a deliberately vague and thinly sketched existence to show that something is missing in Fred's life.

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The problem is that nearly everything about Fred is symbolic, and he never feels like an actual person. Other characters are even more abstract, especially Cindy (Maika Monroe), Fred's former high school classmate whom he becomes fixated on locating. After a strange encounter with a homeless man who may also be a figure from Fred's past, Fred starts having visions of his high school days, when he and Cindy and their other friends were regularly taking a mysterious drug called Mercury. O'Brien plays both the adult and teenage versions of Fred, and the line between his memories and his waking life starts to blur almost immediately.

Dylan O'Brien in Flashback

Did taking Mercury somehow give teenage Fred a glimpse into his possible future? Or is the drug still in his system as an adult, allowing him to re-experience his past? MacBride hints at these possibilities and more, without ever advancing the plot in a meaningful or rewarding way. Fred seeks out his old friends Sebastian (Emory Cohen) and Andre (Keir Gilchrist) to try to figure out what happened to Cindy, but they just become elements of his shifting consciousness, seemingly unaware of the transitions between past to present.

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Cindy herself is more of a concept than a person, a representative of what Fred gave up to become a respectable member of society. Flashback's ostensible big ideas are just stereotypical existential stoned musings, and MacBride's cross-cutting between time periods emphasizes that Fred's final exams in school and his big presentation at work are iterations of the same meaningless societal expectations. There's nothing profound here, no matter how self-important the tone may be, either for the poorly defined characters or about life in general.

Maika Monroe in Flashback

MacBride hints at some sort of larger sci-fi world connected to Mercury, whose properties and origins are never clearly defined, but he never follows through, and most of the apparent hints and clues amount to nothing. At first, Flashback coasts on its air of mystery, and MacBride creates some inventive transitions between time periods, especially as Fred is unsure whether he's in the past or present, waking or dreaming. Flashback's emotional anchor isn't the relationship between Fred and Cindy, but rather Fred's relationship with his mom (Liisa Repo-Martell), who lies in a hospital in a near-vegetative state after what seems to be a stroke or aneurysm.

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Fred's visions of his childhood and happy memories of his mother amount to little more than his Mercury trips, though, and MacBride obscures any potential emotional breakthroughs by questioning the validity of every moment that Fred experiences. If it's all meaningless, then why would viewers care about what happens? The actors are as stranded as the viewers, and O'Brien sleepwalks through the movie with more or less the same affectless stare, whether Fred is preparing his big presentation at work or experiencing a Mercury drug trip. Monroe, who's been a vibrant presence in movies like It Follows and Villains, merely smiles beatifically and encourages Fred to think outside the box or whatever.

MacBride seems to be building toward the mind-blowing revelations of classics like The Matrix or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but the movie that Flashback most closely resembles is the similarly annoying Owen Wilson/Salma Hayek drama Bliss from earlier this year. Like Bliss, Flashback raises lots of questions about the subjective nature of the characters' reality, and then just shrugs its shoulders and moves on. The two movies even have remarkably similar endings that seem to turn them into clumsy anti-drug public service announcements.

The endpoint of Flashback feels entirely arbitrary, though, and the narrative is so repetitive and circuitous that the movie could have ended at any point in its last half-hour or so without making any difference. MacBride delivers the finale with the fanfare of a magician unveiling his greatest trick, but it lands with an anticlimactic thud. The movie's original title was The Education of Fredrick Fitzell, but by the end, neither Fred nor the audience seems to have learned anything.

Starring Dylan O'Brien, Maika Monroe, Emory Cohen, Hannah Gross, Keir Gilchrist, Amanda Brugel and Liisa Repo-Martell, Flashback opens Friday, June 4 in select theaters and on VOD.

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