Most aspects of this film are compelling enough, but it is far from free of forced quirks, frustratingly timid characters, and metaphorical clumsiness – as was also the case with July’s (stronger) debut Me You And Everyone We Know. July’s pursuits originally inhabiting the realm of performance art, it makes sense that the tone of the film is relentlessly melodramatic and largely figurative. Fit to burst with atmosphere and symbolism rather than realistic documentation.
July plays Sophie, a dance teacher and one half of the central LA couple - a couple whose hipness and juvenility are rivalled only by the film’s - the other being Jason (Hamish Linklater), a tech support phone operator working from their flat. Both characters’ stopgap occupations have become their respective ruts, and their demeanours and moods secure the impression they are aware of and disillusioned by the fact.
The pair decide it would be a good idea to adopt a cat – a compulsion clearly displacing the urge for a child they are in no way mature enough to have. The cat itself is anthropomorphised to astoundingly irritating effect, and has dedicated soliloqual segments that foam and overflow with amplified sentimentality. Its cartoonish paws (one injured; one of the cheaper grasps for audience sympathy) is embodied by an excruciatingly saccharine voice (provided by July), and it just makes you want to run out of the cinema screaming and not buying a cat.
They are given a month-long wait until the cat is theirs, at which point it dawns on them that it will tie them to responsibility for an estimated five years. They pause and reflect on their lives, and subsequently each enter respective existential crises, with a shared aspect of befriending much older people, seemingly arbitrarily. Jason begins canvassing for an environmental campaign group and makes friends with an old man he meets door-to-dooring, whilst Sophie makes contact with a man they bought a drawing from.
The film overall can be disproportionately sentimental itself, particularly in its not-so-believable pacing and script, along with some cringe-worthily transparent metaphor, for example: the couple have an in-joke about a superpower to stop time, that manifests literally later on in the film at a particular point of emotional pain for Jason. There is a delicate balance between powerful and irritating when it comes to July's figurative moments, and it is all too often tipped one way.
The Future has existential implications that are (satisfactorily) ambiguous, and at odds with the whimsical tweeness of the characters and tone. The way the couple break down following years of passivity towards each other and toward life is melancholy and moving, and the most impressive thing about July’s film-making is the attempted fusion of whimsicality and underlying emotional darkness. So far however – and more the case here than on her debut – the former is just too overwhelms the latter.