While watching 2018’s Lifechanger, I was reminded of a passage I read somewhere and I had to look it up afterwards. I was surprised I did not immediately recall the source, as it is from my all-time favorite book. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake contains this passage: “I’ll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I’ll make you me.”
In this indie horror-drama, our protagonist has to adopt the form and memories of another person on a regular basis. After each of these “jumps”, as I will be calling them here, they only have a few hours before this new form starts decomposing. They don’t intend to discover what happens if they let themselves rot away completely. The person they steal a life from is left behind as a shriveled corpse, and there are few of these burned beyond recognition and buried on a farm somewhere.
I’ll go ahead and get my main issue with this premise out of the way. We will eventually learn, courtesy of a first-person narrator (and, for a change, I was grateful for narration), this has been going on for decades. The time between these jumps has been becoming increasingly shorter, necessitating a higher amount of turnover. Also, our protagonist has been operating out of the same city for what appears to be the past few years. Taking these facts into consideration, this must be a metropolis with a far greater number of missing persons than the average burg of similar size, and it seems a decent detective would be able to follow the trail of these disappearances, as each would be linked to the preceding or succeeding one in some way.
I was also a bit unclear on the nature and mechanics of the process. There is a mention of antibiotics slowing down the rate of decomposition. Cocaine, on the other hand, speeds it up, if I understood correctly. I’m not sure why our lead would ever want to accelerate the necessity of acquiring a new body. But they also say how much they just like cocaine, so there’s that. Maybe this is a statement on the destruction nature of addiction—I wasn’t sure.
A unique aspect of this I appreciated is I don’t think I have seen another film where so many actors played the character, if one doesn’t consider the long-running television series Doctor Who. There were also the numerous Bob Dylans of I’m Not There and Gilliam’s replacements for the deceased Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but this film feels like more of a direct through-line of a consistently defined character that is merely performed by a succession of actors.
Which leaves his love interest, played by Lora Burke, as the person with the most screen time. An intriguing element of the setup is what happens when somebody with our narrator’s highly unstable condition becomes smitten with another. Having to find a new body roughly every day or so puts huge restrictions on the ability to have long-term commitments.
This relatively low-budget film doesn’t explore the possibilities of its intriguing premise as much as I hoped it would. I didn’t have any recommendations for avenues to explore, but I was hoping it would have more surprises than it does. There’s not even many memorable lines, though I do like what one iteration, a dentist, says to a patient of theirs right when the anesthesia takes effect: “This isn’t the first time I’ve been a dentist.” I also like how the dog outside a bar always greets them, regardless of the body they are inhabiting.
I find it odd digital technology has provided the means for such professional-looking, but low budget, films as Lifechanger to exist. Here is a novel idea, but just slight enough in its execution to make me suspect it is unlikely it would have been made back in the more costly and difficult era of film cameras and splicing tables. I didn’t find any specific faults in any of the performances, but something felt less than fully convincing about every one of them. I would recommend this to the curious as a rental.
Dir: Justin McConnell
Starring Lora Burke and a long line of people who play our main character
Watched on blu-ray