The Gateway

Year:  2017

Director:  John V. Soto

Rated:  M

Release:  September 4, 2018

Distributor: Defiant

Running time: 90 minutes

Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Jacqueline McKenzie, Myles Pollard

Intro:
...a solid effort that traffics in ideas and emotion rather than pixels and explosions...

Particle physicist Dr. Jane Chandler (Jacqueline McKenzie) is working on an experiment involving teleportation, but the latest trial brings unusual results: piercing the barrier between alternate dimensions. Normally proving the Many Worlds Theory would be cause for celebration, but a personal tragedy intervenes: Jane’s loving husband, Matt (Myles Pollard) is killed in an accident.

In her grief, Jane seizes on a unique but chancy opportunity to salve her emotional wounds: she locates an alternate world where she has died and Matt lives and brings the parallel duplicate of her husband back to our world. However, she does not reckon with just how worlds and people might differ, and this new version of her partner might pose a terrible danger.

The Gateway is low-key highbrow sci-fi, eschewing spectacle for twisty plotting, provocative ideas, and a compelling central performance from veteran actor McKenzie, who is utterly convincing as an intelligent woman who nonetheless makes a singularly poor decision in a moment of emotional turmoil. Pollard, too, does admirable work, quickly sketching a likable persona for ‘Matt A’ before sinking his teeth into the decidedly more ambiguous ‘Matt B’.

Director and co-writer John V. Soto has chops for this sort of thing, having built a solid career by making genre fare on a tight budget, starting with 2009’s The Crush. The Gateway is his most conceptually adventurous work, dressing what is effectively a domestic drama in the trappings of science fiction. It works well, for the most part, occasionally faltering due to the odd off performance, or out of place element (there’s an electrical gun doohickey that comes into play later in the proceedings that is too jarring in the way it’s deployed). The proceedings build along rational lines, working within the boundaries established by the premise and never breaking the rules.

That’s both admirable and unfortunate, in that The Gateway never quite manages to lever itself up out of the acceptable and into the realm of the notable. Essentially, it feels like a rote episode of a genre anthology series expanded to feature length: watchable and engaging in the moment, but never pushing the boundaries enough to be remarkable. That’s no cardinal sin, but with a premise like this the gates of possibility are wide open, and the film never explores them as far as it could.

The question is whether The Gateway will find an audience. Those looking for drama may be put off by its genre elements, while SF fans may baulk at the film’s lack of both spectacle and overt fantastical trappings. Hopefully the right eyes will find it, though; while The Gateway is no instant classic of the field, it’s a solid effort that traffics in ideas and emotion rather than pixels and explosions, and that alone makes it worth your attention.