Counter Clockwise is an indie film, however, it is well done. It paints a very interesting puzzle that you hope will be solved all the way until the end.
Michael Kopelow plays a scientist named Ethan. At the beginning, Ethan and his lab partner are working on an early stage teleportation device. Their first attempt on a live subject is with a small dog with an ejected tracking device. The system says that it's successful, but the dog doesn't reappear. Ethan goes home and we meet his wife. Ethan orders flowers for his mother for upcoming birthday. He goes to the liquor store to buy some wine. When he's leaving the store, someone being chased bumps into Ethan and his wine falls and shatters on the ground.
The shattering of the wine bottle is the first clue that something has gone wrong. And this is an important clue that the viewer isn't aware of until much later, if at all.
The next scene, Ethan is ordering flowers for his mother's upcoming birthday party. On the cam feed from his lab we see that the teleported dog has reappeared in the transporter. Ethan goes to the lab and finds his dog, alive and well. Ethan leaves his partner a voice message that the dog returned.
Ethan, of course, injects himself with a tracker and tries to teleport himself for very disastrous results.
Ethan finds himself 6 months in the future and into a timeline that his lab is now owned by another company, his house for rent, he's accused of killing his wife and sister, and his mother is in a coma after a stroke.
What is really intriguing about the story is not the time travel, it's more about Ethan trying to unravel what has happened to his life and how to put it back together without making things worse.
Ethan is a rather unreliable narrator. He is prone to fantasies, which his mother says to him in one scene that he's been driving her crazy since he was a child. So, is Ethan really transporting himself into the future, or has he simply gone mad and killed his wife and sister?
At one point, his old boss says they downloaded all his data and all they saw was a tracking device that's completely undetected. So, is it a teleporter? A tracker? A time machine?
However, soon we realize that Ethan is really stuck in a loop that started before he ever stepped into the teleporter. We later realize that the person that bumps into Ethan in front of the liquor store is himself running from corporate bad-guys.
Another clue that he's stuck in a loop is that the first time he sees his lab partner after using the teleporter, she tells him that he keeps going back. For him, it's the first time so he's confused and so is the viewer. Since Ethan has a tracker, the lab partner has been keeping tabs on him and she says Ethan has used the machine "again."
After watching until the end, I realized that the movie wasn't just about Ethan time traveling, it was also about his sanity unraveling. As he desperately tries to fix the murder of his wife and sister and illness of his mother, he slowly unravels the story of what happened, but seems to be unable to fix any of it. In that sense, it reminded me a lot about the Australian movie Triangle (2009) with Melissa George. In Triangle, Melissa plays a grieving mother that finds herself in a mystery and a time loop and no matter how far back she goes, she finds herself in the loop. Ethan is a similar loop, so the story is non-linear as he jumps back and forth to reveal what happened after he tries the transporter.
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