Again Again, dir. Heather Ballish and Mia Moore 

It’s not untrue to say the Aberdeen-set Again Again is about a woman (Mia Moore) who, after living in a Groundhog Day (1993)-style time loop for a decade, wakes up one morning suddenly free from it, stressfully confronted with the rest of her life and how she wants to proceed with the 50 First Dates (2004)-adjacent relationship that’s partly defined her many years of temporal imprisonment. But part of what’s compelling about this Russian-doll-structured movie, before it reaches a level of climactic toxicity I’m still not quite sure what to think of, is how its several flashbacks continue recontextualizing and changing the meaning of everything seen before it. A one-sentence summary doesn’t feel adequate enough. Its ground is as shaky as its unsettled heroine’s hold on reality, seeming to be about one thing until it isn’t anymore.

Assets & Liabilities, dir. Zach Weintraub

Now 38, Zach’s younger self would be disappointed with who he’s become. For the protagonist of the antic comedy Assets & Liabilities, having a wife, child, and home isn’t so bad. More unforgivable is his transformation into a spineless corporate sellout, so unbothered by the gravity of, say, evicting a client purely for the cashout that he plays an online game as he kicks off the process by phone. As written, directed by, and starring Tacoma filmmaker Zach Weintraub, who plays a hilariously pathetic version of himself spiraling during a weekend alone, the 62-minute-long Assets & Liabilities unexpectedly becomes, at its climax, a supernaturally tinged horror movie where the character’s sanded-down moral clarity comes back to bite him. But it’s plenty horrific before then as a pitch-perfectly cringey portrait of someone who’s become profoundly uncool who every day yearns for the person he once was. Generous with but not overly reliant on the fish-eye lens and other well-timed visual techniques bespeaking Zach’s alienation, the smart, funny, and self-flaggeting Assets & Liabilities made me an immediate fan of a filmmaker with whom I hadn’t before been familiar.

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Image: Courtesy of SIFF