‘Jagged Mind’ Movie Review: A Time-Loop Toxic-Partner Thriller That’s Too Hard to Swallow
Photo from Hulu
From Jeremy Kibler
In Jagged Mind, writer Allyson Morgan and director Kelley Kali explore a toxic relationship through a time-loop-adjacent plot hook. The film doesn’t shy away from confronting such harrowing subject matter to come across as cheap, nor does it feel exploitative for exploitation’s sake. There is some compelling material here for a psychological thriller, but the mechanics behind the plot device grow increasingly silly, becoming more and more difficult to buy into any of it. That’s kind of a deal-breaker with any story.
Based on writer Morgan’s own short film First Date (part of Hulu’s Bite Size Halloween collection), the re-titled Jagged Mind follows Billie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), an art curator living in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami. Encouraged by best friend Kim (Kate Szekely), she stops hooking up with her boss, Christine (Rosalind Elbay), and tries looking elsewhere. Just as Billie is suffering blackouts and a bad case of déjà vu, Alex (Shannon Woodward) comes into Billie’s life. She orders Billie a glass of wine from across the room and moves pretty fast from there. Over the course of six months, their relationship seems too good to be true, even if Alex doesn’t completely open up. In between the blackouts and the gaps in her memory that have worsened, Billie starts to see the red flags and the cracks in Alex’s abusive personality.
Jagged Mind is intriguing in concept and occasionally so in execution. Repetition is already baked into this cyclical conceit, but it doesn’t do the film any favors. The script gets too ludicrous for its own good with a lot of ham-fisted dialogue that doesn’t always ring true (and not just when Alex is fooling Billie). Once it is revealed what is actually going on, more questions just arise. With the foundation in reality falling apart like a house of cards, it’s nigh impossible to “just go with it.” This is one of those times where the narrative “rules” needed to either be spelled out more or remain completely ambiguous.
The lead performances also don’t do enough convincing. Maisie Richardson-Sellers (Netflix’s The Kissing Booth movies) and Shannon Woodward (TV’s Raising Hope) shouldn’t be faulted; both actors do what is asked of them, but Billie and Alex fall squarely into protagonist and antagonist roles without much nuance in between. Alas, the intentions behind Jagged Mind are far more interesting than what the finished product actually ends up being.
Rating: 2/5
Jagged Mind is available to stream on Hulu as of Thursday, June 15th, 2023.
