"Life is a long highway, and what we pass along never comes back," says a disparate, terror-stricken Carlos, played by Humberto Busto (Amores Perros, After Lucia), to his younger brother, Oliver (Fernando Álvarez). The brothers, petty thieves, are, along with bull-headed detective Raúl (Raúl Méndez), coming to realize that they're prisoners within an odd Möbius strip-like stairwell, in Isaac Ezban's insanely assured directorial debut, The Incident (El Incidente). A similar predicament has befallen a dysfunctional family of four on a road trip, where a 10- year-old Roberto (Santiago Mendoza Cortes) is the first to observe that they appear to be revisiting the identical lonely strip of road repeatedly. Fear sinks in as Roberto's little sister, Camila (Paulina Montemayor) needs her asthma inhaler and the baffling time loop they've strayed into will not allow for it, and she will die. The Incident takes some huge risks, narratively speaking, and a resourceful Ezban, who has essentially taken on some restrictive and circumscribed snags; limiting the cast to only a few per each isolated vignette, curbing the action to one location, and yet he still makes for some truly intriguing sci-fi. Fans of outlandish, character-driven psychological mysteries such as Lost or Twin Peaks, or acolytes of prolific speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick—whose 1958 head trip novel Time Out of Joint is explicitly referenced—will find much to be rhapsodic about here. Ezban is a thoughtful, resourceful, and adept director. Using a budget that must have been a mere fraction of a fraction of, say, Christopher Nolan's undue Inception, Ezban takes an infinitely more imaginative and precarious approach, with a far better pay off. In fact, as far as speculative SF goes, there have only been a handful of filmmakers bold enough to truly consider the mental strain and intellective injury that would be endured space or time travellers. While it may not be of the same calibre of Tarkovsky's Solaris or Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Incident is of the same lineage, and for a first effort, Ezban shows great potential. The Incident is a gripping, good-looking, and resounding achievement, filled to the fringe with humour and hubris, too, both essential ingredients to make such strange fiction fulfilling. It's outcome is hard fought and edifying, reflecting enlightened excellence. Ezban's got a long career ahead of him, and it's a thrill to see his first flight.
(from my review at Vivascene.com)
(from my review at Vivascene.com)