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Time-travel films will always make viewers wonder, “If you could travel back in time, what would you change?” The sci-fi short film The First Time I Never Met You quickly explores the paradoxical problems of rewinding time: you might go back to fix a problem but end up creating a bigger one.
Written and directed by Eric Kole, the film follows a grieving scientist, John (also played by Kole), who is working hard to crack the key ingredient to time travel. He has lost his wife, Esme (Renee Bailey), and desperately wants to turn back the clock to change his family’s fate. But when he finds himself in the past, on their first date, things don’t work out the way he intends. While John is armed with the knowledge of their future, for Esme, he is a stranger, a first date that creepily knows too much.
The title ‘The First Time I Never Met You’ may give away a crucial twist, but at 13 minutes, it’s a swift, engrossing tale about love, loss, and accepting life as it is. Despite the limited screen time, Renee Bailey lights up the frame as Esme, and it’s easy to see why a workaholic scientist like John finds it difficult to survive the vagaries of life without her radiant presence. But by becoming obsessed with time travel, he misses out on father-daughter moments with his lovely kid, and going back in time only jeopardizes his future family further.
The cinematography is charmingly simple, the storytelling straightforward, and the lesson sharp: living in the present is better than exhausting yourself over ‘what might’ve been?’. If you’re a sci-fi fan and a fan of short films, check this out.
You can watch ‘The First Time I Never Met You’ on YouTube, it’s also embedded below.