I’ve always been fond of this movie. A houseful of twentysomethings discovers that their recently deceased neighbor across the street was a scientist who invented a camera that takes polaroids of 24 hours into the future, with, in this case, less predictable results than that setup at first suggests.
I can’t say it’s a great movie. It would have been kind of the sci-fi equivalent of a “teen scream” horror movie, but—despite some serious flaws, such as some flabbiness in the second act involving an unnecessary bad guy whose performance just screams “miscast hipster actor trying hard to play a tough”—it’s saved by mostly above-average clever ideas and execution, showing some careful and creative plotting right when it’s needed, and which gets better as the movie goes on… it’s kind of the reverse of the frequent “started good but ran out of steam” problem.
On the contrary, this starts out alright, and, despite some bumps along the way, picks up steam all the way until it barrels through to a really satisfying conclusion. I spent the first half of a much later second viewing saying to myself, “This is good, but I’m not sure it’s really much better than average, I don’t know why I liked it so much last time,” but by the time it was over, I was like, “Oh, yeah! I did like this so much for a reason!”