Two Distant Strangers (2020)

Two Distant Strangers arrives with a thesis taped to its forehead and a stopwatch in hand. Carter James, a graphic designer, cannot get home to his dog. Each morning he wakes beside his date Perri, walks out into New York, meets Officer Merk, and dies. Ninety-nine times. The time loop is not a puzzle to be solved but a sentence to be served, and the film treats it as such, dispensing with the metaphysics of the device in favor of repetition as indictment. It runs about thirty-two minutes and spends nearly all of them making a single point, which it makes well.

That point concerns race in America and the frequency with which Black men are killed in police encounters. The film does not gesture at this. It commits to it. Travon Free wrote it, Free and Martin Desmond Roe directed it, and Joey Bada$$ carries the lead with a weariness that reads as earned by the twentieth death. The blood pooling into the shape of Africa is not subtle, and the closing roll call of names is not meant to be. Andrew Howard's Merk delivers a monologue about Carter's noble performance that functions as direct address, the villain explaining the film's argument to the audience because the film would rather be understood than admired. It is a message piece, and it knows it.

What it declines to do is equally legible. Perri exists to open the loop and nothing more, a starting position with a face. Queerness, class, climate, body, neurology: absent, unaddressed, unclaimed. The film has one grievance and it does not dilute it. Whether that constitutes focus or narrowness depends on the viewer's appetite for sermons delivered at volume. The Academy gave it the short film prize, which suggests the appetite was sufficient that year.