Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ultrasound’ on Hulu, a Lo-Fi Sci-Fi Puzzle Movie That Might Not Be Worth Piecing Together

Now on Hulu, Ultrasound is of a specific type of indie sci-fi thriller that does the most it can with limited resources. Director Rob Schroeder and writer Conor Stechschulte bring a pile of ideas to the table, arrange characters and settings within them and craft a “puzzle” movie that hopefully all comes together in the end without any pieces falling down the furnace vent or being eaten by the cat. This one has to do with gaps in the narrative, optical illusions and odd laboratory settings that could add up to aliens, pseudoscientific woo-woo or something on the spectrum in-between. Maybe it’ll hold together or maybe it’ll fall apart; let’s find out.

ULTRASOUND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It was (sigh) a dark and stormy night. An unnatural but beautiful royal blue sky loomed above blackness with two headlights slashing through it. A board with nails sticking out of it. Tires, lacerated. The rain, falling like buckets, very full buckets. A man, Glen (Vincent Kartheiser), sloughs from the auto to a nearby house. Drenched. Art (Bob Stephenson) lives there, with his wife Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez). Can Glen use the phone? His iPhone is waterlogged, but was it in such a state before he got out of the car and into the rain? Maybe there’s no cell service out here. That must be it. Here Glen, here’s a towel, put on this robe, sit down, have a drink, have another drink, then another. It’s late. Just stay here tonight, the nearest garage and motel are many miles away, and oh by the way, please feel free to have sex with Cyndi. She’s like 20 years younger than Art, who isn’t shy about discussing his struggles with depression, which probably has something to do with his inability to satisfy Cyndi.

Nice people. Accommodating. Too nice! TOO ACCOMMODATING. But Glen is a little bit drunk and Cyndi is sweet and earnest. The next morning, Glen awakens to an empty house and gets dressed and walks on down the road. Then, the title graphic, which looks like the product of a Texas Instruments home computer, or maybe a Commodore. Remember those? Some time has passed. Glen still looks damp. Sloughy, like he sloughs everywhere. Should we read into that? Maybe, but we’ve known people with bad haircuts and posture like an understuffed stuffed animal, so maybe he’s just always like that. Art knocks on his door, and Glen isn’t happy to see him. Glen found the board with nails, but does he really think Art sabotaged Glen’s evening so he could get Glen in the house and talk him into doing it with his wife? Seems farfetched, doesn’t it? Oh, by the way, Art has a video camera and he makes a big to-do about plugging it into Glen’s TV so he can show Glen images of Cyndi, specifically Cyndi being pregnant. But… Glen thought he didn’t… and it couldn’t have… the mechanics of it… but I guess the memory is hazy?

We meet two more characters, Katie (Rainey Qualley) and Alex (Chris Gartin). She’s lonely in an apartment all the time, he comes and goes. Thing is, sometimes Katie is obviously pregnant and sometimes she isn’t, and sometimes Alex looks like Art. It has something to do with mirrors, I think. This is where the movie starts not adding up, like a broken Texas Instruments calculator. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because it’s sort of our job to put the calculator back together and see if it works, apologies for mixing metaphors. There are scenes in which Glen has apparently Done The Right Thing for Cyndi, and they’re living together and preparing for the birth, and scenes involving people in a lab/research setting, primarily Dr. Conners (Tunde Adebimpe) and his assistant Shannon (Breeda Wool). No more will I say, lest the spoiler helicopters flutter off to report me to the authorities.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ultrasound is Chris Nolan on a fraction of a fraction of his usual budget. It definitely has more in common with Memento than The Prestige and Inception, but is surely inspired by all of them. Also, think Primer or The Vast of Night in terms of high concept/lo-fi dynamics.

Performance Worth Watching: For reasons that are complicated and have to do with spoilers, Breeda Wool plays the only character who seems to have a conscious conscience; without her empathetic performance bridging the gap between two types of characters, the movie likely wouldn’t be functional.

Memorable Dialogue: Shannon gives us hope for eventual clarity of this confounder of a plot when she says, “It’ll all make sense as we go along. I promise.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing noteworthy.

Our Take: There tends to be a breaking point with “puzzle” movies, where either we’re drawn into the intrigue or we deem it more trouble than it’s worth. Ultrasound is 49 the former and 51 the latter, because it ultimately tests our patience a smidgen more than it rewards it. Schroeder slow-drips revelations about the nature of what’s happening and why, too slowly slow-dripping it, engaging our curiosity but setting its emotional hook too late. I was frustrated by its pacing and flattened tone, and vaguely dissatisfied with the conclusion the movie reaches. It attempts to generate some tight-wound tension, but the logic beneath it isn’t sound, and the answers it gives us feels more muted than revelatory.

The point of all of this is, well, I’m not sure. The film addresses issues of ethics within science and politics, but those strands are ill-defined and too broad and obvious to be effective. It stirs up implications about the nature of memory and identity, but the characters are too loosely defined to stir up any serious concern, and play second fiddle to the plot and its many intricacies. It’s unfocused and draggy and the plot holes are too obvious, e.g., if the Glen character had a single friend, relative or co-worker who could arouse concern, the gig would be up in seconds. And I think all the puzzle pieces are present, but maybe it’s not worth fishing out the one that got kicked into the gunk under the stove to finish it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The best films of this ilk make us put in a little bit of work at the same time they entertain us. Ultrasound feels more like work than entertainment.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Ultrasound on Hulu