PLOT SUMMARY: Teresa learns there are gruesome side effects to time travel.
I would imagine that anyone who is interested in time travel it would be because they want to change a certain event in their lives that had consequences affecting their lives.
Honestly, if we did go through a troubling period, met a person who brought more problems into your life than happiness, and you find yourselves thinking you wished you could have handled things differently, well don’t.
We were meant to go through certain experiences in our lives and meet these annoying people because they helped us shape the person we are.
Still, there are some people like Teresa who are interested in time travel because, in her words, Quantum Physics is a curse and the one thing you should do when you're cursed by it is build time travel machines.
Shifter: Plot of the movie
Teresa is lonely, socially awkward, prefers burying herself in books rather than hold a normal conversation with anyone.
So she builds a time machine, which isn’t any of the fancy gadgets we saw in other movies. Hers is a metallic cylinder with wires and cables, and a round window to look into and out of. She uses her barn to conduct her experiments and has a notebook where she jots down her notes. She has a cat, the poor defenceless companion who is subjected to a time travel experiment. He returns and she is filled with glee and the urge to celebrate.
She wears her best dress and calls up a colleague from work who barely knows who she is. Her colleague plainly asks what she is celebrating and if it is her birthday. Teresa can’t very well let the world know yet that she’s been conducting time travel experiments. She apologizes for calling and cuts the call.
But she wants to celebrate her accomplishments but not with the cat who helped her and risked its life. Nope. She heads out alone to a bar and orders champagne.
Instantly she’s hit on by a barfly. She dodges his advances, doesn’t drink any more of her champagne and leaves. But before she does, the man insults her.
Teresa goes home dejected and carries on with her life which includes dreary work at a warehouse where she has to operate machines and is scolded by her supervisor for attempting to fix the machines herself.
At lunchtime, she tries to connect with her colleagues but they look at her as if she wishes she were in a teen romance movie where the awkward teens eventually end up with the hottest guy in the end. There are no hot guys in the warehouse.
At home, she is visited by a neighbor who knew her family well but also enjoys poking her nose where it doesn’t belong and prying into Teresa’s private life. She tells her about how the house was thought to be haunted as the previous family saw an apparition. Teresa is mystified and wonders if the neighbor said that mainly to seem interesting as she wasn’t responding to her inquiries.
She goes to the diner later and it is her brother who waits on her. She doesn’t speak to him because he didn’t help with their father’s funeral. She doesn’t listen to him as he doles out lame excuses and attempts to reconcile.
Later she gets a call from a man while she’s poorly attempting to toss garbage into the trash can.
On the date, he tries to be charming and get her to relax, but she still feels awkward and maintains no eye contact.
When he excuses himself to take a call then returns, a golden ring falls out of his pocket.
Teresa snatches it and puts it on the table. Her date is clearly married and a liar.
Frustrated, Teresa heads home to put herself in a time machine. She wants to go back two hours ago.
Now, this part gets confusing. She goes back two hours, gets into her truck and drives with her other self to the restaurant. She knows her date is married already. She sees him pocket his wedding ring, then breaks his car window and gets the ring then puts it in his pocket. So when he meets the other Teresa, the ring rolls out of his pocket.
Perhaps she didn’t want to play with the time frame too much or else why not simply cancel the date? Or maybe she just wanted to break the guy’s car window for fun and revenge and see if she would make a crafty vandal.
She succeeds and smiles to see the guy crying over his broken window. But her happiness is short-lived.
She’s played around with time and now everything is going awry. Her cat keeps melting before her then returning. It doesn’t eat too much. She keeps getting stomach aches, really bad ones.
For the next hour or so, all we see if Teresa puking and melting before our eyes. She keeps disappearing, keeps seeing her other self in other places.
She finally meets a girl in the library called Blake and starts going out with her but the time frame doesn’t allow Teresa to have any romance in her life and so while she is being intimate with her, her body starts to rip apart and because she holds down Blake, she too disappears.
Shifter Ending Explained with Spoilers!
Teresa comes back but Blake is nowhere to be seen.
The only living thing that loves Teresa now is the cat. Teresa tried to stabilize herself but melts and rips in a theatre in front of all the people who are annoyed very easily when someone coughs.
Teresa keeps going back and forth more than before without the machine. She’s taken back to the time the family who lived in the house before saw the apparition. It was her, fuzzy and ripping away. She sees her father, goes through the pain of seeing her brother walk away from his responsibilities. She stomps into the cafe and slaps him hard.
That’s enough revenge for her.
Finally, she ends up in a barn and sees the machine has gone and her cat is lying in a ripped, bloody mess. It is dead and no longer jumping in time like her.
Teresa takes the cat in her arms and is sad. She knows that eventually, this will be her fate too.
The movie is just plain sad. When we see time travel movies, we expect our hero to get something in return for putting their life in jeopardy.
Teresa’s life was miserable and lonely before. It was worse afterwards.
Scare scale: 2/5
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