Rebecca C Scott, “Together Forever” (2022)
A well-made film, driven almost entirely by its characters’ dialogue, turns what could have been a maudlin romance tragedy into a savage horror tale of psychopathic greed and a vendetta of revenge. Ben (Christopher Sky) and Luna (Megan Cochrane) appear to be a happily married couple, living in their beautiful home near the beach where they go surfing most days – but Luna is suffering from an incurable disease and her life is slowly ebbing away. In desperation they consult Dr Matilda Mays (Rebecca Ritz) who tries to advise them to accept the inevitable and to treasure the times and experiences they had together. Luna later reveals to Ben that she has spent her parents’ inheritance investigating cloning technology and has had a clone of herself made to replace her when she is gone.
Luna’s revelation leads to an unexpected plot twist involving murder – and soon Ben welcomes Luna’s clone into their home. The clone has Luna’s memories going all the way back to Luna’s childhood – and she reveals she knows things Luna has never told Ben before. This – along with flashbacks to the original Luna’s happy times with Ben – sets the scene for a second unexpected plot twist where a second murder (the mirror replication of the first) occurs. But will the second clone also have memories of its original genetic parent’s murder?
The film cleverly uses visual and music soundtrack tropes and similes to establish a stereotyped romance tragedy. The science fiction aspect is driven almost entirely by Ben and Luna’s conversations with just a few shots of their clones’ development in special tanks to underline the dialogue. Fittingly the action takes place in an environment where just Ben and Luna live – seemingly a happy environment at first, with sunshine and surf, and a beautiful home by the beach – but over the course of the video, darkness intrudes with the coming of evening and the film takes on an unhealthy, claustrophobic ambience.
The film’s minimalist style forces audiences to guess Ben and Luna’s motivations for doing what they do: does the original Luna guess what Ben ends up doing, and does Ben do what he does out of compassion for Luna or to satisfy his own egotistic needs? And does the cloned Luna act out of revenge and a sense of righting wrongs? If so, why then is Ben cloned and will he remember what was done to the original Ben? A dilemma then presents itself: the clone cannot be Ben if he does not have all of Ben’s memories and awareness – but then the clone becomes a danger to the cloned Luna. If ever an apparently perfect romance was destined to go down a vicious downward spiralling circle, this one is it.
The film suggests that people are much more than their physical entities: they are made up of their memories and experiences, including any illnesses they have – and to take one of these away from a person devalues that person’s identity.