Flashback aka The education of Fredrick Fitzell

Year of release : 2020

 

Run time :1h38m

 

Genre : Drama / Thriller

 

Cast : Dylan O'Brian, Maika Monroe

 

 

Written and directed by Christopher MacBride,this movie starts very well but then loses itself and just feels convoluted,not knowing what it wanted to be or where it wanted to go. I loved the soundtrack,the way it was edited,but it doesn't go anywhere,it just goes in circles.

 

After seeing a homeless person on the street,the lead starts thinking about this girl who used to go at his high school, and starts contacting his friends who knew her. That's how we find out he actually knew her and were getting high together on a drug called Mercury or something. They were drug addicts.

Considering this scene with the girl trying to save him kept on repeating itself,I honestly thought he was in an accident,or had an overdose,which would have been a great plot twist,and a reason for the state he was in.

 

This movie builds to nothing,it's made up to be something like Donnie Darko or The Butterfly Effect,just that this one makes no sense,and it doesn't deliver. Everything they show you,it's there just to fill the running time,as if they have a certain run time in mind and they have to get to it.

 

There's this kid who keeps on appearing in the lead's visions or dreams,to the point he's scary like an omen,he kept on saying words that he puts together in his mind and create a phrase which pretty much says he's in someone's experiment (which would have been a great plot twist also,to be either in the mental institution or whatever or in an alien attack). And then it doesn't deliver. For a moment,they even made it seem like his mother was the one having him trapped in the experiment the kid was talking about. But no...it just felt it kept on building up to something which never happened.

 

The actors were all great,but the movie fails to deliver .

 

I love movies in which the character doesn't know what happens to them(Soul Survivor,Vanilla Sky,Lost Things,Coma(2020 Russian movie)),but this one wasn't it.

 

The movie is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, and is for rent or sale on Amazon, Apple, DirecTv, Microsoft Store, Redbox, Vudu, YouTube.

 

Rating : Coulda been a contender ! , I'm only rating it like this because of how it started and where it could have gone but didn't.The movie was The Horror,The Horror level for me.