Crew
Director – Kourosh Ahari, Screenplay – Aldis Hodge, Edwin Hodge & Jonathan Keasey, Based on the Film Parallel Forest (2019) by Lei Zhang, Producers – Aldis Hodge, Edwin Hodge, Jonathan Keasey, Sean Lydiard, Jaylen Moore, Elliott Michael Smith & Wequizi Zhang, Photography – Pip White, Music – Josh Atchley & Denise Santos, Visual Effects Supervisor – James Rorick, Visual Effects – Sturdy Bird (Supervisor – Michael Colarik) & WaveFX, Special Effects Supervisor – Rob Musnicki, Production Design – Shawn “Major” Major. Production Company – Rumble Riot/Hodge Brother Productions/Freemont Films/Mammoth Pictures/Beijing Pu Luo Media Company/One Dollar Studios/Bondit Media Capital/MindRiot Entertainment/Fluffy Bear Media/Grand Boulevard Entertainment.
Cast
Danielle Deadwyler (Vanessa), Aldis Hodge (Alex), Edwin Hodge (Martel)
Plot
Vanessa is with her husband Alex and Alex’s brother Martel at their cabin in the woods. It is the anniversary of the death of her and Alex’s son and Vaneesa is still closed off with grief. Vanessa is walking in the woods when she is startled to see another version of herself, who immediately starts shooting at her. On successive ventures through the woods, Vanessa finds that minor things have changed when she returns to the cabin such as which hand Martel accidentally burns. She then encounters another version of Alex in the woods. He is a physicist and explains that this area of the woods acts as a portal that takes a person through to another world of the multiverse where minor things have changed. As Vanessa tries to find her way back through the portal to where she came from, she comes across more horrifying worlds where she is dead, or Alex and others are trying to kill her.
Parallel is an English-language remake of the Chinese film Parallel Forest (2020), which does not appear to be widely seen. Parallel is written by Aldis Hodge, who is known as an actor for roles in Straight Outta Compton (2015), as Hawkman in Black Adam (2021) and as the lead in tv’s Cross (2025- ), who co-writes/co-produces with his brother Edwin, who is also an actor. The actual director is Kourosh Ahari, who is Iranian born but moved to the US in his teens. I had previously been quite impressed with Ahari’s debut film The Night (2020) about a couple trapped inside an enigmatic hotel.
In the 2020s, the term multiverse has become identified with comic-book films, in particular MCU entries such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and sequels, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) and The Flash (2023) where basically multiverse means ‘alternate takes on familiar characters.’
In physics however, multiverse has a very different meaning. In 1957, physicist Hugh Everett postulated his Many Worlds Solution, which refers to a theoretical series of alternate branching possibilities for each and every action. Here a multiverse would be as mundane as someone turning left or right, a coin toss being heads or tails, or, as here, which hand someone burned, or if they did at all. There is another whole other series of multiverse films that derive from the Many Worlds take with the strong and intelligent likes of Coherence (2013), Parallels (2015), Parallel (2018) and the hit of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). (For a more detailed listing see Alternate Timelines and Multiverses).
I have one or two small quibbles with the Hodge Brothers’ interpretation of a multiverse. At one point, Danielle Deadwyler encounters a version of Aldis who has become a physicist. However, physics is not a field where you can just jump tracks as though it is better-paying job – it requires years of study. So surely if his doing so was different to the other Aldis’s (who presumably are not physicists due to his having to specify he is one) then that means the person he is had a branching timeline some years earlier than the Aldis she knows. That calls into question things like whether he and Danielle Deadwyler would have still met and married, bought the same cabin in the woods and had their son at the same time.
Parallel is economically contained to one house and the adjoining woods and a cast of three. Initially, the variations start out as small touches – the burn on Edwin Hodge’s hand switching hands – and quickly gets darker. There’s the particularly good scene where Danielle and Aldis return to the house and run into Edwin who is utterly haunted due to the fact that in this timeline both of them were the ones killed in the crash. In another, Danielle returns to the house only to encounter two versions of Edwin running out the door into the woods. Or she returning to a timeline that she thinks is her real one only to find that moments later the brothers have killed another version of her. All before reaching a perfect ending.
Trailer here