Somewhere In Between

It’s New Year’s Eve and everybody’s out socialising, bumping into old friends, and rubbing elbows with happy strangers to ring in the changes. Everybody that is, except Emily and Jack, who have decided to keep things simple this year. Emily (Misiak) had a bit of a nightmare at last year’s event, with her relationship coming to an abrupt end just as the ball dropped in Times Square, so now she just wants a quiet night in and good friend Jack (O’Flanagan) has said that he’ll keep her company.

Everything’s going swimmingly as the two settle in for the evening, with Jack in charge of the fizz and Emily keeping the requisite distance away to unmistakably keep Jack firmly in the friend-zone. After a couple of awkward moments and a swift clinking of glasses everything suddenly gets upended as a bizarre looking stranger (Horan) bursts in through the back door babbling some stuff about the spacetime continuum and asking what year it is. After announcing himself as some sort of time-traveller, the stranger continues to profess in his best Doc Emmett Brown manner that everything is wrong, that it should be raining and there should have been a blackout by now, and that if it doesn’t happen it will have dangerous ramifications for the future.

Swiftly the action moves out to the garage where the time-machine has landed, and boy what an impression does that make. The time-traveller, bathed in smoke and lights, now comes to the crux of the matter and reveals himself to be Emily and Jack’s son. In a frantic state he reasons that if there’s no rain, and no blackout, then there’ll be no opportunity for the will they/won’t they companions to have a candlelit dinner and fall in love, there’ll be no future for them, and he will cease to exist. It can only be assumed at this point that everyone’s last name is McFly. Then the rain starts.

At this point, Somewhere In Between has only expended five out of its fifteen minutes of runtime, and so there’s still plenty of story, action and craziness to come. It’s really impressive that writer/director Kyle Vorbach and co-writer/producer John Horan have already managed to fit so much in to a short five minutes but there’s no short-changing the audience here as the second and third act are just as full as the first. A clever sidestep takes us away from the obvious Back To The Future (1985) narrative and a satisfactory denouement keeps the audience engaged all the way to the end, with Mike Ladouceur guiding us professionally the whole time through his tense and exciting score.

With Vorbach having already said that it was Horan’s and his goal to “make a short film that felt like a summer blockbuster” it’s great to see that this production team have managed to achieve exactly what they set out to do. Certainly, the production design on Somewhere In Between is out of this world compared to most other low-budget indie movies out there, and everything feels thought of and cared about from the smallest details on the props to the big show of the lighting and effects. Special mention also goes to DoP, Skyler Bocciolatt for the sumptuous, luxuriant feel of the photography and Vorbach’s own Lonegeni.us, who took care of the sound and visual effects, both of which really add a level of class and style to the whole proceedings.

Rounding off the summer blockbuster feel to this short film is the flawless acting from all three leads. Taylor Misiak and Ryan O’Flanagan complement each other perfectly as Emily and Jack, giving natural performances which range from awkward to gooey-eyed to dumbfounded and back again, while John Horan nails it as the half-crazed, frantic time-traveller. Everything in Somewhere In Between is first class, from the opening shot to the last, and so much is packed into its tiny fifteen minute timeframe that it genuinely offers the experience of a big-budget blockbuster to the audience.

What Future Boyfriends, Vorbach and Horan have created here is a smart, fun and compact, good old-fashioned summertime movie, all distilled into fifteen minutes. It hits all the right bases and even has a fair chunk of an old classic summertime movie in there, too. Somewhere In Between breaks new ground on old ideas and packages it with some truly great audio-visual entertainment. What’s not to like?