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!"

EDIT: I found this old review floating around without a title. I think this was my review of "Time Lapse" from my first viewing. Most of it seems to fit, although the villain is named Ivan, not Russell, and I'm not 100% on why I would have thought of "Sexy Beast". But beyond that, it seems to fit:

For the first few scenes I really thought it was going to suck, the acting was just terrible and the characters paper-thin, and ridiculously clean-cut, preppie-looking character Russell supposed to be some sort of scary mad-dog psychopath.

And then something magic happened, and with every scene it got better and better, until by the end I was really impressed and really enjoyed it without reservation. I wouldn't call it a great film, it's definitely got its amateurish flaws, but I'd give it a very, very solid B+, way better than a lot of first time directors' films.

This is an amazing cross between the kind of super-lo-budget indie horror older folks like me tend to think of as "USA Up All Night" flicks—let's face it, the actors uniformly suck, and Russell in particular, is horribly miscast, supposed to be a murderous psycho but seeming more like an overacting college kid, which he probably was—and a really well-executed, smartly written neo-noir/genre flick.

This film wears its influences on its sleeve, although the long shadow of Quentin Tarantino is an interesting thing to see fairly successfuly integrated into what is basically a horror thriller. To spell out all the obvious influences would be to give away too much of the plot, which is nowhere near as straightforward as it initiially appears its going to be, but this film is sort of a cross between the wave of tarantino-influenced neo-noir ("Sexy Beast" also springs to mind for some reason, probably the gritty realism, which this film apes only cartoonishly) and some offbeat & interesting horror movies I could name with plots that revolve around loopiness in time.