Sore: A Wife from the Future · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man wakes up alone in an apartment in a Croatian hill town, and there is a woman in it who says she is his wife. Not from another country. From later. She has been sent back because the smoking and the drinking and the ruined sleep are going to kill him young, and she has come to fix it the way you'd fix a leaking tap.

Then he wakes up again.

The loops in Sore: A Wife from the Future get shorter every time, and that compression is the whole film. Hendra Adhi Susanto won Best Editing at the Indonesian Film Festival for it, which is the most honest award the film received, because the loop was never a writing problem. It was a rhythm problem: establish the rules, then take passes away, then take more, until repetition starts to feel like acceleration instead of a stall.

Deleuze has a precise name for what this does to time, and it isn't "time travel." In Cinema 2 he borrows a formulation from Robbe-Grillet: the present of the future, the present of the present, the present of the past, all in play at once, none of them the real one. He calls these peaks of present. An ordinary flashback keeps time tidy — here is now, here is a labelled then. A peaks-of-present film drops the labels. Sore is not a memory of Jonathan's marriage and not a prophecy of it. She is that marriage, in the room, in the present tense, while the present tense of a man living alone goes on around her.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because it changes what you think the film is failing at. The standard complaint — that the stakes are surprisingly trivial for a time-travel premise, that the imagery outruns the screenplay under it — assumes the science fiction is the engine. It isn't. It's scaffolding. The subject is two times sharing a kitchen.

Deleuze's larger name for that arrangement is the crystal-image: an actual thing and its virtual double locked so tightly you can't say which one is the reflection. Sore is Jonathan's virtual half. She is the marriage he hasn't had, standing in the apartment of the life where he hasn't had it, and if her mission succeeds that marriage will never need to happen the way it happened. Reviewers keep describing the apartment as the story's gravitational center. They're right, and the reason is structural: everything the film knows about time it says by holding two tenses inside one set of walls.

But the crystals Deleuze cared about most were the flawed ones. He found them in Renoir — a sealed, gleaming, self-completing world with a single crack in it, and through the crack a character escapes into an actual future instead of circling forever in a perfect one. That is the second act here. The loops fail. They keep failing, and the shortening is the crystal tightening around them. What finally opens it is not a better habit. It's Jonathan's father.

This is where the design shows. Sore's mission is behavioral: cigarettes, alcohol, sleep, exercise. Deleuze would call those symptoms in the strict sense — acts that aren't about themselves, that sit on the surface of a drive underneath. His own examples come from naturalism, films where appetite drags a body down a slope toward death, and the premise here is that slope, domesticated into a wellness fable: keep going like this and you die young.

The loop itself runs on what he calls the small form of the action-image. In the large form, a situation presses on a man until he acts and transforms it. The small form runs the other way: someone acts, and the act discloses a situation that was hidden. That is exactly what each pass does. Sore intervenes, the intervention fails, and the failure exposes a little more of a situation neither she nor we had the shape of. The loop is a diagnostic procedure. Each iteration is a question with the answer narrowing, and the film's real movement is from symptom to root — from an ashtray to a father.

One more thing worth naming. Sore's method isn't persuasion, it's telling. She narrates a life Jonathan hasn't lived, and he starts living toward it. Deleuze reserved fabulation — story-telling, characters caught in the act of legending themselves — for political cinema, where a people that doesn't yet exist gets invented by being narrated. Borrowing it here isn't much of a stretch. The mechanism of this film is a fiction told to a man about himself that makes itself true. It is also, uncomfortably, what an advertisement does, and this story began life as one: a 2017 web series on a sweetener brand's YouTube channel.

Then the ending, which I'd defend hardest. Years later, Jonathan is a working photographer with an exhibition, and the woman who walks into it is the present-day Sore, who has never been his wife and has no idea who he is. He touches her. Her memory returns. Melodrama has been running that scene since before cinema existed. But Bergson, and Deleuze after him, give it a finer name: there are two recognitions. Habitual recognition is sensory-motor — you see the thing, your body already knows what to do, no memory needed. Attentive recognition happens when that circuit fails, when you can't place what's in front of you and have to leave the object, go into the past, and come back. A small failure of the present that opens the depth of time. That is the exhibition scene, staged as a touch. Her habit finds a stranger; her attention has to travel through a marriage that never happened in this timeline to find him. It is close to what Stanley Cavell called a comedy of remarriage, except the first marriage took place in a future the film has just spent two hours abolishing.

None of this arrives from nowhere. Groundhog Day codified the loop as moral therapy, repetition compressing toward self-correction, and Laurens takes the template intact and swaps the joke for a wound. The Time Traveler's Wife supplies the blueprint of a marriage told out of order around a spouse who keeps arriving from another point in time. The deepest debt is to About Time, which shrank time travel to the scale of ordinary domestic life and spent its real capital on a father's farewell. That's not a coincidence of tone. It's the same organ: in both films the machine exists to get a son back into a room with his father.

The Indonesian line matters more. Keluarga Cemara gave Laurens the patient chamber-domestic scene and the inherited father-wound played through restraint rather than incident. Jatuh Cinta Seperti di Film-Film perfected his dialogue-driven, self-aware romantic craft, where feeling outranks plot mechanics — the toolkit he brings to a loop conceit. And beneath it all is his own web series, which he is revising here as a mature filmmaker, with Dion Wiyoko playing the same man eight years on. That is the film's best special effect. Whatever the script claims about time, its most convincing image of it is a face that actually aged between two versions of the same story.

What it did: it carried branded content into a national Oscar submission. A million admissions in nine days, four Indonesian Film Festival wins, Rotterdam's Limelight, a Letterboxd Video Store release that found cinephiles abroad, and — reportedly — the first Indonesian feature shot in Croatia. That last one is a small sentence with a large industrial consequence. It says a mid-budget Indonesian romance can now be a European location production without turning into an art film about being one.

The descendants aren't visible yet; the film is barely a year old. But the address it leaves is legible: a loop at chamber scale, no puzzle, a father at the bottom of it.

The gamble doesn't fully come off. The songs crowd the silences the structure needs, and the images are sometimes more finished than the writing beneath them. Watch it again anyway, and watch the shortening. Count what each pass drops and what refuses to be dropped. Whatever survives the compression is what this film believes a person actually is.