Flyby: an ingenious but weak film on time literally slipping away

Jesse Mittelstadt, “Flyby” (2019)

In its own way this film can be considered a horror film, focusing as it does on how an alien force seems to affect individuals and rob them of control over their lives and the lives of others. A mystery asteroid comes close to Earth and is captured by Earth’s gravity to become a satellite. Not long afterwards, people are being stricken by a strange malady in which they lose all or most of their sense of time passing them by. One such victim is everyday man Bill (Riley Egan) who joins with friends at a bar shortly after the asteroid’s passing is reported on television. Everyone talks excitedly about the asteroid and about the nature of time. Bill later leaves with Cora (Tommee May) and goes to bed with her. When he wakes up later, Cora is already several months pregnant with their child. She walks out of the bedroom, Bill spends some time trying to digest the situation, he hears Cora calling him so he races out of the room and discovers her holding their two-year-old toddler Maven (Bardot Corso).

From then on Bill is lost trying to keep up with a life literally slipping away from him and old age rapidly catching up with him. In the blink of an eye Maven has become an adult (Tommee May again) who cares for her father, Cora having left him years ago in a lifetime Bill cannot remember. Maven turns on a gadget that runs through pictures of their lives together with Cora and Bill gazes at past experiences he has no memory of. In the meantime the mystery asteroid escapes its orbit around the Earth and leaves the solar system, leaving Bill and others like him in old age with no memory of what they have done over the past half-century.

The film can be viewed as a metaphor for dementia or it can be viewed as an attempt to capture an individual’s experience of time as s/he matures and then ages. People’s perceptions of time seem to speed up as they get older so a year seems to pass quickly while a child’s experience of a year is very slow; moreover older people remember how slowly the years went by when they were children! The film might also be seen as a commentary on time itself, and how much of a cultural construct time might be.

While the film’s plot is ingenious, positing the passage of time itself as a time machine, its weakness is that Bill is hardly given any, erm, time to consider the error of his ways and to express regret for past actions that have the effect of locking him and Cora into lives they might have preferred not to live. Character development is very weak and at the end of the film Bill is quite literally the same man he was (or thinks he is) just a few minutes ago because in the space of a few minutes he really did lose most of his life.

The film probably could have been fleshed out a bit more so that viewers see more of Bill’s life as a failing husband and father, his faltering marriage and perhaps the separation and divorce from Cora. Bill’s life comes across as flat and unremarkable. The implication that by losing time, Bill loses control of his life – with the result that decisions he might have made (and which are lost to him) lock him into consequences and situations he cannot change but which further entrench him in an existential prison – is lost on viewers.