Film Review - Ultrasound (2021)

The feature directorial debut from Rob Schroeder looks to take the audience on a journey through the labyrinth of the mind and the maze of memories. Adapted from the comic book ‘Generous Bosom’ by Conor Stechschulte, who also wrote the screenplay, the film follows Glen after his car breaks down on a dark and stormy night. Forced to spend the night at the house of a married couple whilst he waits for his car to be fixed, Glen finds that what he thought was a one time encounter has actually set a chain of strange events into motion.

There is a sub-genre within the sci-fi genre that concerns films with labyrinthine plots, stories steeped in mystery and generally a lot of convolutions and complexities. Without a doubt these sub-genre films can prove amongst the most fascinating and rewarding films to watch. However there are a few caveats to this – firstly the audience must have the patience to wait for the mystery to unfold and secondly, if the audience has managed to hold out patiently, the film must provide some sort of payoff or at least some sort of justification for its earlier complications. Certainly in the case of Ultrasound, these caveats are important to note. To fully enjoy Ultrasound, the audience needs to accept that for the majority of the film, they may not really understand what is going on or why. Ultrasound does eventually start to explain itself but whether or not there is an adequate payoff in the end is debatable and indeed there may be some audiences that find that the journey is not worth the destination.

Ultrasound has some great ideas and an intriguing premise. It poses questions on the way we remember events and the morality of tampering with someone’s memories. But rather than compelling audiences with its cleverness and examination of the human mind, it instead threatens to alienate them with its ambiguity and slow pace. When faced with a jigsaw puzzle of multiple pieces, enjoyment is found in putting the jigsaw pieces together and seeing how the pieces fit with one another. In the case of Ultrasound, it is like being told that you need to put a jigsaw puzzle together but then only being given a few of the pieces – the picture is incomplete, and you are left staring at something that doesn’t quite make sense. By the time you are given all the pieces and the revelations come, the time is up, and you are too ambivalent to care.

Ultrasound is not a badly made film and the cast put in some good performances. In particular Breeda Wool and Tunde Adebimpe stand out as two opposing forces. It just feels that perhaps the source material doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a film adaptation where the intelligent intricacies are lost on the screen and audiences are left to do all the heavy lifting. Ultrasound is an interesting film but may be one best left to die hard fans of the sub-genre who have the patience and lenience to see it through.