"Two Distant Strangers" inherently has two strikes against it. One, that it's yet another time-loop movie, on the heels of a past year alone that has included "Palm Springs" (2020), "The Map of Tiny Perfect Things" and "Boss Level" (both 2021). I'm a fan of the subgenre, and I realize this pandemic year has knocked us for a loop, so to speak, but it's a lot. This isn't even the only time-travel Netflix release to concern preventing a racially-charged police killing of a black man, preceded as it is by "See You Yesterday" (2019)--albeit that one was more "Back to the Future" (1985) to this one's "Groundhog Day" (1993). Second, as much as I find the time-loop premise an aesthetically and cinematically-intriguing notion, I tend to consider the social-problem or message movie the opposite--an ethical proposition that is at worst patronizing and often at least undermines aesthetic qualities regardless of whether they abide by one's own views (and I really don't care whether it does so for the troll reviewers and downvoters of any movie that doesn't comport with their issues on race and gender that occupy much of IMDb these days). This Academy Award nominated short doesn't reinvent the wheel on any of this, but it's all handled surprisingly and mercifully well.
Just when I was afraid we were going to get the "solution" to the social problem, there's a rather inexplicable twist that not only works well to subvert simplistic claims of dialogue being the fixer of all dilemmas, but also to the likewise dependency on resolution in time-loop and movies in general. Solve the puzzle, get the girl, move on to tomorrow. Clever, then, that this one begins with waking up after a casual sex hook-up that may and may very well not lead to further romantic entanglement. Also remarkable is that the police killings have no other rhyme or reason to them, no unique or extenuating circumstances. Carter James dies in a variety of ways, whether recalling the deaths of Eric Garner or George Floyd by choke hold or pinned under a knee until he can't breath, or Breonna Taylor from such police raids, including of the wrong residences (by the way, John Oliver did a good segment on that topic, and it's not surprising that writer and co-director Travon Free likewise comes from a background in writing for other news satire series), and a pool of blood after one shooting here even symbolically (and, reportedly, was unintentional) takes the shape of Africa.
Besides being part of the SayHerName or SayTheirName campaign, which we see an indication of in a helicopter shot of atop one building (and minus that I swear I saw the same sort of shot of maybe the same New York street in the last Netflix release I saw, "The Stand In" (2020/2021)) even before the picture concludes by listing some of the names of those who died at the hands of law enforcement, the tragic irony of this time loop is that by the police murdering Carter, he's in a way been immortalized, but cinematically instead of the real-life sort of martyrdom. One could also see the time loop here as representing a more generalized and shared racial trauma to the racial violence perpetrated against African Americans--that actually Carter is just having a nightmare--that the brutal death of one person affects others and the wider society. It's the very thing we also saw this past year after the death of George Floyd and as this movie is released on Netflix amidst the murder and manslaughter trial for that of ex-officer Derek Chauvin. "Two Distant Strangers," then, is a rare movie where the aesthetics and ethics complement each other. Harmony amidst a realist picture that is anything but.
Just when I was afraid we were going to get the "solution" to the social problem, there's a rather inexplicable twist that not only works well to subvert simplistic claims of dialogue being the fixer of all dilemmas, but also to the likewise dependency on resolution in time-loop and movies in general. Solve the puzzle, get the girl, move on to tomorrow. Clever, then, that this one begins with waking up after a casual sex hook-up that may and may very well not lead to further romantic entanglement. Also remarkable is that the police killings have no other rhyme or reason to them, no unique or extenuating circumstances. Carter James dies in a variety of ways, whether recalling the deaths of Eric Garner or George Floyd by choke hold or pinned under a knee until he can't breath, or Breonna Taylor from such police raids, including of the wrong residences (by the way, John Oliver did a good segment on that topic, and it's not surprising that writer and co-director Travon Free likewise comes from a background in writing for other news satire series), and a pool of blood after one shooting here even symbolically (and, reportedly, was unintentional) takes the shape of Africa.
Besides being part of the SayHerName or SayTheirName campaign, which we see an indication of in a helicopter shot of atop one building (and minus that I swear I saw the same sort of shot of maybe the same New York street in the last Netflix release I saw, "The Stand In" (2020/2021)) even before the picture concludes by listing some of the names of those who died at the hands of law enforcement, the tragic irony of this time loop is that by the police murdering Carter, he's in a way been immortalized, but cinematically instead of the real-life sort of martyrdom. One could also see the time loop here as representing a more generalized and shared racial trauma to the racial violence perpetrated against African Americans--that actually Carter is just having a nightmare--that the brutal death of one person affects others and the wider society. It's the very thing we also saw this past year after the death of George Floyd and as this movie is released on Netflix amidst the murder and manslaughter trial for that of ex-officer Derek Chauvin. "Two Distant Strangers," then, is a rare movie where the aesthetics and ethics complement each other. Harmony amidst a realist picture that is anything but.