Forgotten Films

11:14 (2003)

An excellent little film as good as anything else released here last year, cruelly given a tiny (and as you can see from the date above rather belated) run at the cinema with little publicity. An automobile accident occurs one night at 11:14 pm and the events before and after are revealed as the same ten minutes of time are replayed through the eyes of five different characters as their lives intersect.

The miscellaneous cast includes Henry Thomas (E.T.'s Elliot all grown up), Hilary Swank, Patrick Swayze, Barbara Hershey and Rachael Leigh Cook and all of them appear to be having a great time. Director Greg Marcks keeps all of the different stories lucid through impressive editing and visual clues such as the prevalence of clocks and there's a dark seem of black comedy that runs right through it.

If this has surface similarities to Amores Perros, it's actually spiritually closer to Momento or Crash and the perfect cinematic extrapolation of Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity; Jung said that there was no such thing as chance happening - it's just that we don't know what the connections are yet and during each of the individual stories events that appear insignificant from one point of view become central from another.

The film has just been released on dvd in the uk, but the us release is the one to go for with Marks' illuminating commentary and a feature that lets the viewer skip between stories at crucial moments during the film.