VOLITION – directed by Tony Dean Smith – SPOILERS ⁓

“Everything you see has played out before, you just don’t know it. Most people live out their lives only experiencing the present moment – that fleeting snapshot that’s here for one moment and gone the next.” So says James Odin (Adrian Glynn McMorran) who has had precognitive visions (sometimes frightening ones) since he was a child, and is the only main character whose last name is specified. James’ stepfather Elliot (Bill Marchant) thinks that James is somehow quantumly entangled with the vibrations of future events ringing out across spacetime. At least that’s what he tells his stepson.

James sees just far enough ahead for the visions to be useful to him and what he sees always comes to pass. His childhood experiences have led him to conclude that everything people experience has already happened and they just don’t know it, therefore any choice they make is an illusion. His visions are selective, so he probably sees what he’s looking for (like a seventh round knockout he can wager on or a pack of cigarettes temporarily abandoned in the street). He sees a woman being attacked and rescues her from that. It turns out he will need to do that twice.

The damsel in need of rescue is Angela (Magda Apanowicz). Like James, she is an orphan, and seems to have had an unhappy childhood. Angela lives at a nearby shelter, has a car, drinks beer, and asks a lot of questions. After James rescues her the first time, she drops by his flat asking to use his shower. James has a piano which we do not hear him play and one of his interior walls is concrete block on which he makes notes about his visions. Both the piano and the wall can be viewed as string theory metaphors, but VOLITION is primarily a love story and Angela is much more important than either string theory or the piano.

James normally bets on future sporting events for a living, but because he needs quick cash to appease his rather unpleasant landlord (Jason Simpson), he has agreed to fence some hot diamonds for his friend Ray (John Cassini), but Ray is double-crossed by Terry (Aleks Paunovic) and Sal (Frank Cassini). When Terry and Sal come after James and the diamonds, James and Angela head down the road. After an overheated car forces them to stop, James explains why they’re running, and about his most recent vision: “I saw a gun firing,” he says, “and a bullet hitting me in the chest.”

They go see Elliot, who is a scientist of some sort, and are surprised to learn that he has devised a means of time travel; that James is his test subject; and that clairvoyance is a side effect of the experiments. (He hasn’t told James any of this.) Also, James drew pictures of future events when he was a child. Elliot kept those drawings, and one of them depicts a woman resembling Angela. In the film’s best scene, Angela takes the drawing outside and confronts James with it.

ANGELA: “Is this me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
JAMES: “I drew a lot of stuff back then. I don’t remember half of it.”
ANGELA: “So I’m a part of this. I’ve always been a part of this. Can I tell you something? That moment today when we met on the street, you said that you’d seen me before. I believed you.”
JAMES: “You made fun of me for saying that.”
ANGELA: “Well, it was a cheesey line to say. But I felt it too.” [they kiss]
JAMES: “I can’t escape what I saw.”
ANGELA: “I’m not gonna accept that. We have to try. We have to at least try.”

Director Tony Dean Smith, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Ryan, told Grant Hermanns of Coming Soon: “Our aim was to ground the characters in their respective worlds. Since we use clairvoyance as an affliction as opposed to a superhero ability, our protagonist needed to behave and inhabit a world that naturally extended from his behaviour. So the cross into thriller/gangsters came quite naturally…The fun was in treating the science-fiction element as a character flavor/trait/wound, not as a genre-tell in itself.”

Is free will a matter of perspective? Can people be quantumly entangled (and if so what is the quantum of consciousness)? A line from The Symposium seems to apply. Said Plato: “Humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”

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Miscellaneous info

The motel where they stop after Angela’s car overheats is the 2400 Motel located at 2400 Kingsway, Vancouver, British Columbia. Bruce Sweeney‘s 2019 movie KINGSWAY also filmed at that location.

Angela and James’ beer of choice is Royal City Ale, a dry-hopped ale made in New Westminster, B.C. by Steel & Oak Brewing Company.

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VOLITION can be streamed on PLEX TV
The film is also available on DVD (region 4) and on Blu ray (region B)