Coming out of Sundance, quite a few films received high praise and luckily for SXSW attendees, they were able to acquire 14 of them for our viewing pleasure. One of those films was none other than Safety Not Guaranteed, which is based on a real classified ad writer Derek Connolly found.
While pitching ideas for a new story for a Seattle based magazine, Jeff Schwensen (Jake M. Johnson) shows a classified ad about a man who wants to travel back in time and is looking for a partner to go with him. Jeff takes two interns, Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and Arnau (Karan Soni), on his quest to find the man named Kenneth (Mark Duplass) and see if he is crazy or if he can really time travel. Unable to convince Kenneth to let him join the mission, Jeff decided to let Darius try her luck and see if she can convince Kenneth that she is really serious about time traveling. Once accepted onto his team, Darius soon begins developing feelings for this loner and begins to question her stance on the story and her feelings for Kenneth.
Safety not Guaranteed is by far the best film I have seen at SXSW. The story is very heartwarming and witty but also has a deeper underlining message that soon appears in the film. It goes from being about time travel and becomes more about why people travel in general and what are
we looking for on said travels. Johnson and Soni provide just the right amount of comic relief while Duplass gives the audience his most heartfelt performance thus far. You can’t help but begin to root for Duplass and hope he really isn’t crazy and that time travel actually exits. By the end you leave with a smile on your face and a very happy heart. Director Colin Trevorrow hits the nail on the head with each shot and the flow of the film never leaves you with dull moment.
The film killed it at Sundance and the consonance around SXSW is the same, everyone is in agreeance that Safety Not Guaranteed is a must see film when it hits theaters on June 8th. The film has just the right amount of comedy mixed with romance, action and mystery. The one small flaw, yet I wouldn’t even call it that more so a personal request, would have been to add about five more minutes to the end so that we could get a bit more closure on a few of the other characters. Again, that is more of a personal request then a critique, because I leave movies wondering what are those people doing now and what they said after the climactic events took place. If people leave your movie asking those questions then you know have done a damn fine job.
Rating: A great heartwarming film with an amazing cast and just the right amount of comic relief. 10/10 (first one of the festival)
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