Day 104: TiMER (2009)

My friend Hayley suggested I watch this film, and while I'm not a huge fan of rom-coms, she assured me that there was enough sci-fi in it to make up for it being a romantic comedy.

The concept of TiMER is a simple, yet unique, one: what if you could have a timer installed on your arm that will tell you the exact day you will meet your soulmate? Once you get your timer installed it starts counting down to midnight the night before you'll meet your soulmate for the first time, and the following day when you meet your soulmate the timer beeps. Of course, the timer will only start counting down once both people in the soul-match have a timer, so if you're "supposed" soulmate hasn't gotten around to getting one yet, your timer will remain blank. This is the issue that plagues the film's protagonist Oona. Her sister, Steph, has a different issue with her timer - the countdown is over 20 years in the future. They live together and deal with trying to have relationships in which you know the person you're dating isn't the one before you even meet them. It's a very weird concept, and, sadly, doesn't get explored enough.

Some questions that bothered me throughout the film concerning the timer were:
1) Can you not die until after your countdown has run-out? Presumably the timer, if it can see the future to know when you're going to meet your soulmate, it would know if you were to die before you were to meet your soulmate.
2) What if your soulmate lives in some other continent where the timer isn't used yet?
3) What if you are never "destined" to meet your soulmate?
4) What if your soulmate has no arms? They make the point that the timer can only function when placed on the wrist of your dominant arm (it doesn't even work on your other wrist).
5) Assuming that for thoughts 2-4, the timer just doesn't flash a time. This is the same result if your soulmate doesn't have a timer installed yet. So someone with a flashing timer will spend their whole live searching for someone that they might never find. Isn't it better to find someone and be happy with them even if they aren't "the one" then spend your live looking in vain?

The film deals with this last issue. The issue of wether it's better to "settle" and be happy, or to keep waiting and hoping. While it's definitely the key issue raised by the notion of the timer existing, the whole film is far too predictable to create any real thoughts on the matter. Oona, the flashing timer owner, meets and falls for a younger guy who she believes has 4-months left on his timer. She knows its a meaningless fling, and in four months he'll move on. When she discovers that he actually doesn't have a timer and has a fake one instead, she starts to question her feelings for him. When, at the same time, a man enters her sister's Steph's live with no timer, it doesn't take a genius to realize where the story is going to go.

I found the idea of the timer and all its possible meanings much more enjoyable than the film itself. The film had charm and a sense of quirkiness that can only be found in indie films like this one, but this charm and quirk is brought down by the lack of depth to which the timer is dealt with.