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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Future

THE FUTURE (Miranda July). 91 minutes. Opens Friday (August 5). See listing Rating: NN


Miranda July’s The Future illustrates the dangers of an artist becoming too sure of herself. The story of a self-involved couple who decide to adopt a cat in a month’s time and immediately freak out about the impending loss of freedom, it’s a headlong plunge into twee self-indulgence.

As Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) spin into separate crises, July throws every one of her stock tropes – awkwardness, furtive sexuality, wide-eyed stares into the middle distance – at the screen.

It’s insufferably precious in a way that July managed to avoid in her 2005 debut, Me And You And Everyone We Know that film viewed its dislocated characters with a tenderness and compassion absent here.

This movie feels far more mechanical, overstuffed with stilted gestures and artificial profundities that become more stultifying as they pile up. I’m fully aware that I’m not necessarily supposed to like these people, but I should at least be interested in them as the subjects of a drama.

It says something when the device of having the cat narrate the action is actually one of the least obnoxious things in the film.

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