Flashback is a hard watch and not just in terms of the confusing and not
very interesting story but also because director Christopher Mac Bride
chooses to use so much strobe lighting effects that you’ll come out of the
movie either in an ambulance because you’ve had a seizure or alternatively
you’ll feel as if you’re playing the part of a tortured terror suspect in
the recent and infinitely better movie, The Mauritanian.
The story, or what I can fathom of it, sees Fred Fitzell (Dylan O’Brien),
many years later, fretting over some drug that he took with a classmate
(Hannah Gross) just prior to her strange disappearance. A chance meeting
with an old school pal takes him back to his past where he starts to dabble
in the same drug that caused him so many problems in the first place.
Throw in some issues with his mother, who appears to have had some kind of
stroke and is now lying lifeless in a hospital bed, and some strange
hallucinations where Fred might or might not be travelling back and forward
in time and it all becomes a bit of a head scratcher.
Flashback is such a mess it’s hard to recommend, unless of
course you’ve got a liking for people constantly flashing bright lights in
your eyes then this might be for you.
