A Thousand Kisses Deep REVIEW

"The high quality of this woodwork is REALLY turning me on."

Release Date: 15 June 2012
15 | 84 minutes
Distributor: Tomori Films
Director: Dana Lustig
Cast:Dougray Scott, Jodie Whittaker, Emilia Fox, David Warner, Jonathan Slinger

What if you could relive any event from your life, just by going up or down in the lift in your building? Well, for starters, it’d be really inconvenient every time you needed to take the rubbish out, and you’d have to tell the pizza deliveryman to use the stairs – but more importantly, if you couldn’t leave the past alone, you’d probably end up creating paradoxes all over the place.

Which is pretty much what Mia does in A Thousand Kisses Deep. After witnessing her future self’s suicide, she discovers the lift’s time-travelling properties, and decides to change the course of her life by stopping her past self from falling in love with the man who ruined it. (As opposed to, say, trying to get over him in the present.)

Unfortunately, her meddling doesn’t have any Back To The Future-esque consequences. Neither Mia nor the film has any interest in the mechanics of time travel; it’s more about the emotional consequences of revisiting your past. Frankly you could get much the same effect by looking at old photographs.

The whole film plays fast and loose with logic – for example, Mia’s haircut is the best disguise since Clark Kent donned a pair of glasses – but it’s in the final reel, when the last awful, sick-making twist is revealed, that it all really falls apart. Neither proper science fiction nor serious romantic drama, A Thousand Kisses Deep is, in the end, too stupid to be worthwhile.

Sarah Dobbs

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