By Bradley Gibson | February 4, 2025
"...keeping viewers in edge-of-your-seat suspense to see what will happen, he’s also included some delightful moments from actors we don’t see much anymore..." "...you are in for a treat."
Director Don E. FauntLeRoy has created a complex, genre-spanning dramatic feature in Altered Reality. Oliver Cook (played by screenwriter Charles Agron) often takes his family to a B&B called Spring Manor. Oliver, his wife Caroline (Alyona Khmara), and his daughter (Quincy Faler) go there to escape and relax. The old caretaker of the place, Jack (a delightful appearance by everyone’s artificial person from Aliens, Lance Henriksen), always greets Oliver warmly and gives him sage advice. When Oliver notes that Jack never seems to age, Jack laughs it off. Oliver suffers from horrific migraines, and on one visit, Jack offers him a drug to treat it.
The miracle pill turns out to be a near-panacea that can cure everything, and Oliver markets it, resulting in extravagant wealth for him. Along with the money comes the interest of unscrupulous people who entangle Oliver in business and personal relationships that could end his marriage to Caroline and destroy his career. His advisor, Cooper (Tobin Bell) helps lead him into a world of strippers and glamour that nearly undoes him.
The business of being fantastically wealthy becomes such a distracting obsession for Oliver that he is not at Spring Manor when his daughter disappears and is never found again. It is not clear whether she had an accident or was abducted, but the assumption is that she is dead. On his next encounter with Jack, Oliver learns that the land around Spring Manor has special qualities that can move a person back and forth in time under particular circumstances. As the threads of the story fray into wildly complex twists and turns, Oliver begins to understand and explore this opportunity to alter events in the past and begins to wonder if he can fix his life by changing the past. Can he create an Altered Reality?
FauntLeRoy has experience in a number of genres as cinematographer and director and moves seamlessly between styles, a trick not many film-makers could pull off. Altered Reality invokes dramatic elements of horror, thriller, science fiction, and fantasy. He creates a wonderful visual language here, where the past is in sepia-tone and moves a certain way vs the present.
As well as keeping viewers in edge-of-your-seat suspense to see what will happen, he’s also included some delightful moments from actors we don’t see much anymore (and one we never will again). Henriksen always delivers a solid performance, as does Tobin Bell. There is a scene featuring the late, great Ed Asner in one of his last appearances on film. Leads Agron and Khmara carry the narrative with energy and grace, with Krista Dane Hoffman offsetting them in her maniacal turn as Alex.
There are a couple of missed opportunities in the story. A better connection could be made between the woman Oliver saves in the past during the witch trials and his present-day family. Also, the ultimate reveal of several characters seems to come out of left field and should have been set up earlier, but these are minor nitpicks from someone who perhaps watches too many movies (or not… there are never too many movies). The film is an intersection between Fatal Attraction and Back to the Future, and if that sounds intriguing, you’re in for a treat.
See the full review here: Film Threat