Another End 2025 Movie Review
“Another End” is billed as a science-fiction romance film that made the film festival tour in 2024 that is now set to open at select theaters and VOD on September 19th. As much as the film definitely qualifies as sci-fi, the romance part leaves something to be desired, falling somewhere between underwhelming and droll when the filmmakers hoped it would be its centerpiece. Close, but not quite.
Set in some undisclosed future but looking a lot like today, Sal (Gael Garcia Bernal) plays a young man whose wife, Zoe, recently died in a car accident in which Sal was the driver. Naturally, he is having difficulty processing the loss. He’s so grief-stricken, despondent and depressed, his sister, Ebe (Berenice Bejo), a scientist at the Another End Institute, offers Sal a chance to reconnect with Zoe through technological software that allows people to say goodbye to deceased loved ones. They store memories and consciousness of the dead into a database that is then fed into a “host” body who for a short period of time assume the “essence” of the dead person, though not knowing it.
I know, this sounds like a lot of techno-babble nonsense, and to some degree it is, but it creates a “what-if” scenario that many sci-fi movies in the past have harvested that reconnect the living with the dead through some advanced technology too fantastical to conceive. But for the purposes of this film, as co-written and directed by Piero Messina, it’s intended to move us to tears when a man is able to recapture his lost love. Unfortunately, most of that love angle is one-sided because the host of Sal’s wife’s memories is someone who doesn’t seem quite willing, or able, to share.
That would be Ava (the amazing Renate Reinsve), a young woman chosen to be the host of Zoe’s memories, a stripper at a high-end gentleman’s club who grieves over the loss of her child years ago and who seems to have given up on life just like Sal has. With Ebe now growing concerned that Sal is overdoing his visits with Ava, which aren’t working so well, it’s obvious the end is near and Sal just has to let go. This is why the romance angle is so one-sided. It is not until near the end that Ava, now knowing she’s been playing the role of Zoe, is now able to see Sal as Zoe, not as Ava.
Long stretches of “Another End” wallow in self-grief with expanded segments of Sal emoting, facing life with misery, despair and tremendous guilt having been responsible for Zoe’s death. He’s unable to reconcile the loss, and Sal’s sister Ebe knows this and puts her job on the line at the Institute by allowing Sal to extend his visits with Ava. There’s a big twist in the story at the end that only in retrospect did I fail to notice as to what state of mind, and body, Sal was actually in. This twist helped me appreciate the melancholy of the meandering slow-burn romance of the story.
Confronting ethical and philosophical issues by tampering with our lives in a futuristic setting where anything is possible, the convoluted nature of this fangled technology, messing with our emotions, creates a situation almost too implausible to conceive. But, as food-for-thought, the film works well enough through the invention of science to deliver the kind of story I’m sure it was meant to be…to define what it means to be human. As contrived and drowned in sorrow as it is, I identified with its ability to capture remnants of that all but elusive compassion of the human spirit.
