Film Review: The Mandela Effect (2019)

Over the past few years, I became acquainted with a bizarre new theory that suggests our reality is changing. You remember Nelson Mandela, the South African leader who passed away in prison in the 1980s? No, he was alive up until 2013. You remember the Berenstein Bears? Look again--they've always been spelled as the Berenstain Bears. Was it Jiffy peanut butter, or just Jiff?

People are noticing small details everywhere that seem slightly off, and they'd swear that it was never this way. I read up on many of these details, and I gotta say--it's mostly baloney. Especially the movie lines--these are so easy to misremember, especially when they're erroneously repeated or spoofed by other people and sources. Even movie titles can be hard to remember properly (I knew a guy who always pronounced Mel Gibson's Apocalypto as "Apocacrypto" and I couldn't fathom why he pronounced it that way--but hey, the Mandela Effect really got to me when I realized the Tom Cruise vampire movie was always Interview With THE Vampire and not "a" vampire). There are many factors that contribute to an individual misremembering things, but it can spread into the public consciousness when biases are constantly reinforced and all humans share a similar thinking pattern. Yes, I believe our public forgetfulness of Nelson Mandela's fate was purely natural, and not some malevolent force changing reality. If nothing else, Occam's Razor would favor the former as the more likely explanation. But come on people, some of us can affirm that these details were always one way and not the other--I only had to ask my mom about the Berenstain Bears to confirm that it was always spelled "-ain," and I had simply been spelling it wrong all this time (phonetic and cultural influences affect that memory). To suggest that a person's memory is flawless and it's the world that changes--that's just arrogance.

Suffice to say, I don't believe in the Mandela Effect, beyond the notion that people's brains are fallible. But that's not to say that the phenomenon isn't fascinating--I do find myself drawn to reading and studying it, even though most cases people bring up make me roll my eyes.

It's only inevitable that some filmmaker would use this as a premise to drive a thriller in which a character's reality changes all around them--this is the kind of thing that could invoke Franz Kafka's or Philip K. Dick's strangest nightmares. Hell, even I've been inspired to spin this into a possible novel idea. It's just as well though that David Guy Levy beat me to the punch with The Mandela Effect movie.

The film follows a typical guy (Charlie Hofheimer) who has a wife and child, but in a tragic accident his daughter passes away. In the course of everyday life, he catches onto the small details that seem off (the real-life details mentioned above--the misspelled Berenstain Bears, the misquoted Star Wars lines, whether or not Curious George has a tail). Inevitably, he digs into the details behind the Mandela Effect and discovers that reality is indeed changing all around him--even to the point where reality changes before his eyes.

The film casts its net wide, encompassing the typical conclusions you might have already heard about (most especially Simulation Theory--which, like The Matrix, simply suggests we're all living in a computer simulation). The Mandela Effect layers on the ideas of String Theory and some brief philosophical musings on free will to create the illusion that there's a reason behind all of this madness. However, the film never really delivers a satisfactory answer--maybe we're supposed to speculate on our own that a higher intelligence (or God) is running our universe as a simulation, but this is never made explicit, and if anything it comes off as an unfocused babble. What's really disappointing is that the film paints itself into a corner--when reality seems to finally break, it has no choice but to fall back on the old Donnie Darko trick and use a quick and dirty montage to take us all back to the beginning. Only, in this case it feels like a repeat of the Futurama joke where the characters can't go back in time--they wait trillions of years for the universe to die, become reborn, and wait for everything to happen exactly as it had before. Played straight though, it comes off as a cheap and uninspired--maybe even pretentious.

It's not all a total wash though--the film is perfectly watchable, thanks to the fair photography, grounded performances, agreeable pacing, and an wonderful electric music score. The film only suffers because its script feels like a first draft--so full of unrefined ideas and musings, but made even worse with blunt dialogue, random voice-overs, and bland characterization. It's at its worst when it tries to beat viewers over the head with its ideas--it's pretty clear the film wants to draw cosmic connections and deliver thought-provoking existentialist themes, but there's no nuance or clarity. On the other hand, the film also tries its hardest to make you care for the character and his family--but once again, there's no nuance behind the emotions.

I can't help but to think that Donnie Darko achieves the film's goals in a better, more succinct way, and it does so while maintaining its enigma. And without any bloody Mandela Effects. The difference is in the scripts--one successfully shows more and tells less, and one does not. I can't buy The Mandela Effect, but it is watchable and its finale does have a few interesting effects. When it comes to thrillers that involve changing realities, there are much better titles worth watching.

4/10