Photo Gallery
Unlike those films, though, Uncertainty splits itself up by genre. In Brooklyn, designated in the film's busy cross-cutting scheme by the couple's green outfits, their day is a low-key family drama, as Kate's mother (Assumpta Serna) expresses motherly dismay toward her daughters and their life choices, prompted by Kate's sister Sophie (Olivia Thirlby) thinking of holding off on grad school for a career in the arts, like Kate. Manhattan, coded with yellow, turns into a thriller when the couple recovers a lost cell phone; soon they're receiving threatening phone calls from multiple parties, some offering money if they give up the phone, others offering physical harm if they don't.
The writing-directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel trades in seriousness. Their thriller The Deep End boasted uncommon gravity and a typically severe Tilda Swinton performance, and now Uncertainty, even with its buzz of youth and the playful potential of its split timeline, keeps an almost equally straight face. This is not an exercise in stylistic showing off.
On their own, the stories probably wouldn't make it as features, or even necessarily short subjects: the Brooklyn half is fairly uneventful and the Manhattan half, while fast-paced, lacks the story or the stunts to maintain its velocity. Both pieces of the puzzle feel longer than they actually are. Cut together, though, sometimes in surprisingly speedy fashion, Uncertainty becomes an experimental character study of Bobby and Kate. Experimental not so much in style but in science, as we watch the same people react to different stimuli.
As such, both stories eventually touch upon some pre-existing conditions in their relationships, looming choices that will ultimately mean more than where they spend their holiday. Though it's framed like an exploration of fate, in a sneaky way, the film is more about distractions: How the events of our daily lives, be they mundane or pulse-pounding, inform, complement, and cloud our ability to make decisions. Collins and especially Gordon-Levitt create a fully believable relationship, filled with little, minor conflicts rather than big histrionics. Through a purely movie-world concept, the film arrives at some surprisingly real, vivid feelings.
