Film Review: Volition

What I like about lo-fi science fiction films like Volition is how they are able to bring a different angle and a skewed perspective on otherwise common ideas and tropes that are often seen in the genre. In Volition, our main character, James (Adrian Glynn McMorran), has the ability to see very brief glimpses of the future, often refereed to as clairvoyance. It sounds like a golden ticket, but it doesn’t turn out to be quite as lucrative for James as one might expect. Sure, he is able to make bets on stuff like boxing matches, but he’s still behind on rent, and he finds himself doing things simply out of obligation since he saw a vision. If anything, his “special powers” are more inconvenient and exhausting to deal with.

The story itself revolves around James taking an offer from a local gangster Ray (John Cassini) to take care of some blood diamonds. Because he saw a vision of himself taking the offer, so he accepts, and holds onto the diamonds. However, things soon get complicated when two of the Ray’s lackeys, Sal (Frank Cassini) and Terry (Aleks Paunovic), betray him and decide to steal the diamonds from James. But right as they try to break in, James gets a vision of his death, leading to him and Angela (Magda Apanowicz), a woman he helped earlier in the film, going on the run.

However, as simple as that might sounds, that is only the tip of the iceberg. At around the 40 minute mark, the film takes a rather sharp and sudden left turn into full on time travel territory. For the sake of keeping the experience for you fresh, I won’t give away any of the details away. What I will say, is that the film explores the nature of fate versus free within the trappings of an intertwined, time-bending plot where James is given an opportunity to set things right, and on a path where he could potentially change his fate.

For a film like this, it could be easy for the director, Tony Dean Smith, and his co-writer/brother, Ryan W. Smith, to get bogged down in the intricacies of time travel mechanics. However, they opt to keep things fairly simple, and easy to follow. The script is tightly constructed with some great setups and payoffs, and the journey James takes is thrilling and compelling to watch unfold, and it never gets confusing as to what exactly is going on at any particular moment. And when it does finally reach its conclusion, it goes to a place that genuinely caught me off guard.

This is a science fiction film that doesn’t rely on spectacle, so it is really within the characters and story where it needs to work, and thankfully, both those elements work really well. James is by all accounts a very standard archetype, the jaded, smoking, drinking loser just casually going through life without purpose. However, Adrian Glynn McMorran brings a lot of humanity to the character, and an emotional grounding that easily gets you invested. He has solid chemistry with Apanowicz, but if there is a noticeable flaw, it’s that the romance that kind of develops feels rushed, and I found it hard to fully buy.

While Volition might not necessarily go as deep as something like the recent Alex Garland miniseries, Devs, which explores similar themes, it is a far cry from the forgettable bombast of something like the 2007 film, Next, which was a thriller also about a man who could see into the future. It also shows the potential of exploring complex ideas through simple yet effective storytelling. This film was clearly put together by a clever bunch, and I spent much of it admiring how creative it was, and how confident the filmmaking is. It fits nicely alongside other similarly lo-fi science fiction works like Coherence, Primer, Upstream Color, and Predestination that showcases the potential of great, thoughtful storytelling within limited resources and low budgets.

The film is now available on Apple TV, Prime Video & other digital platforms.