April X, the indie sci-fi movie from Michel K. Parandi, is only superficially the story of a man looking for his sister. Instead, the movie is a really interesting, if at times too shallow, story about what makes us us: Is it our memories? Is it how we made those memories? Is it deeper? April X doesn’t always have the answers, or at least isn’t interested in pushing just one narrative forward. But it does set the stage for the questions to be asked, and the questions are often what matters.
Starring Lilly Krug and a Connor Storrie who will look very familiar to fans of Heated Rivalry (but also very, very different), April X is above all things a story about siblings. What would you do for your brother or sister? What would you sacrifice? And what does life without half of your soul look like? Bax is forced to find out after his sister, April, goes missing.
But Bax isn’t the type to take that lying down, especially when he begins to suspect he might be responsible for what happened to April. Instead, the movie goes from a nice exploration of what having a twin is really like, one where Krug and Storrie’s chemistry really shines, to a weird revenge thriller with a dash of sci-fi and a very feminist message. It works, at times, but the worldbuilding is never strong enough to support the premise, and it often feels like the movie has much more to say than it’s able to.
None of this is on Storrie or Krug. Krug is particularly effective at showing us different sides of April, which is what the story needs to work. Storrie, meanwhile, can play desperate, brooding, and determined, not to mention a combination of all those, very well. When Bax is running around, doing increasingly wild things to try to get to his sister, there’s no judgment on our part. We get it. That’s his sister. The movie sells the bond well enough for us to believe it.
It also allows both a chance to showcase that they are more than pretty faces. Krug gets to play soft April and tough April, and moves between one and the other seamlessly. Storrie, meanwhile, displays none of the bravado underscoring a soft center we saw as Ilya, or even the charisma hiding deep insecurity we saw from him in Criminal Minds: Evolution. He’s a good enough actor that even characters with some similar beats feel different, because he’s bringing different nuances to them. And if April and Bax feel like real people and not just characters, even when the story falters, it’s because of how effective the two are.
The problem is that some of the really good ideas brought up by April X are left a bit undercooked by a movie that feels like it’s only as interesting as it manages to be because it hit the jackpot with the chemistry between the two leads. For example: we spend too much time with Storrie in a storyline that feels like a side quest and never ends up having anything to do with the main plot, and then way too little establishing what happens to April.
However, I was very much intrigued by some of the possibilities presented by April X. What you need to know is this: April has a gift: she can control and remember her dreams, which she records on discs so she can experience them again. Of course, that is the kind of gift the wrong people are very interested in. That’s the crux of the problem in a world where technology is much more advanced, and the ways it intersects with medicine feel both creepy and prescient.
But it’s not only April’s memories that the wrong people are interested in, because, of course, it isn’t. This is the part of the movie that I wish had been explored so much deeper, because there’s a really important message here about bodily autonomy and the way men feel entitled to both women’s bodies and their memories. But the movie chooses to focus on Bax’s chase and not on what’s happening to April in the meantime, to its detriment.
There’s still a very interesting idea here about the relationship between identity and memory that’s worth discussing, because it’s really what the movie wants us to focus on. Are we what we remember? If so, can we go back to ourselves just by being presented with the memories that made us who we are? Or is the process of acquiring those memories in the first place just as important? To me, the answer is pretty simple. But what is your answer? And more importantly, what is April’s? What is Bax’s? And do they even agree?
Are you excited for April X? Share with us in the comments below!
April X is in theaters October 2nd.
