It’s no small accomplishment to fashion a taut thriller with a complex science experiment as its central plot point. But Eric Schultz’s debut feature, “Minor Premise” does it, at least for the most part, as it works ambitious ideas about neuroscience into the sci-fi genre with all its chills and thrills.
Actor Sathya Sridharan is given the chance to play multiple sides of the same character, Ethan, a brilliant scientist who has discovered how to capture and digitize memories. That leads him to an even bigger leap: manipulating those memories to alter conciseness and thus be able to control one’s nature. Of course, Ethan’s frenzied experiments in his basement lab don’t go as planned. He’s having disturbing blackouts and losing chunks of time. His research colleague and former girlfriend Alli (Paton Ashbrook) arrives in time to discover what’s going on: Ethan has split into nine variations. Not Sybil- like personalities but parts of the whole self such as anxiety, libido, anger and intellect, each appearing for six minutes an hour.
That means the film has a built in race against the clock to create tension as Ethan and Alli try to figure out how to recalibrate the experiment using Ethan’s contraption the R10 and his frenzied formulas before the next problematic self re-appears.
That race against time and danger also means the film sometimes gets repetitive and chaotic. But there are some compelling scenes, including flashbacks of Ethan’s late father, who was also a neuroscientist and whose research has preceded Ethan’s own. Schultz’s script, written with Thomas Torrey and Justin Moretto, is dense and engaging and the production values are impressive for a low budget indie. The performances are solid with Sridharan giving his all in a demanding lead role that puts him through the wringer. “Minor Premise” is an original and well-crafted thriller that proves that, in the right hands, a movie about science does not have to be dull.