![]() ![]() He’s unemployed and on edge, not exactly the best way to be at a place that shoves happiness down your throat. That morning, Jim’s boss calls him and lets him go. The film opens on the last day of a trip to Disney World with his family – wife Emily (Elena Schuber), daughter Sara (Katelynn Rodriguez), and son Elliot (Jack Dalton). But if you’re willing to see beyond the gimmick of its making, and go along with its blackly comic flights of fancy, it’s a visually arresting and utterly unique cinematic experience.Jim (Roy Abramsohn) seems like a pretty average family man. There’s no doubt that Escape From Tomorrow won’t be to all tastes, the vague nature of proceedings sometimes frustrating the dark tone at times quite oppressive. ![]() Jim is pretty repulsive, and yet the actor’s charismatic performance makes him a strangely likable protagonist, and one that you even feel some sympathy for, in spite of his deplorable behavior. Credit should also go to Roy Abramsohn who plays the lead and features in the majority of scenes. The result is more fever dream than coherent feature, and yet Moore manages to pull the ambiguity together in the film’s final few scenes, making memories that are quite unlike the ones that Disney claims to craft at its parks. A visit to Epcot, in which he drinks his way through France, Germany and Mexico and discovers what may be the park’s real purpose, is somewhat hard to follow – run-ins with courtesans, magical pendants and wheelchair-bound psychotics adding to the strangeness and chaos. As Jim’s journey through the looking glass becomes ever-more-odd, the narrative becomes increasingly confusing. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear what’s happening. But it soon becomes strangely enchanting, director Moore combining crisp black-and-white visuals with a soaring score to present a vision of the park that’s both bizarre and beguiling. The juxtaposition is initially jarring, and somewhat disturbing when you think about how such material would have Uncle Walt turning in his grave. It quickly becomes clear that this is a film noir, but one in which Disney princesses are the femme fatales, and the company itself may or may not be the villain. What follows is a tale of paranoia, conspiracy, sex, violence and hallucination, all of which occurs between visits to Space Mountain, the Mad Tea Party, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, and It’s a Small World. Dad then spies a pair of French girls, both of whom are in their mid-teens, and starts stalking them. There’s clearly something wrong with the couple’s son, who is behaving very strangely. The problems start with people coughing and sneezing on the Monorail. So the couple and their little boy and girl hit Disney World for what should be a day of joy, but it quickly turns into the vacation from hell. ![]() Rather than tell wife Emily, he keeps the news to himself, not wishing to spoil their day at the happiest place on earth. The story kicks off with Jim, a father of two, receiving a call from his office explaining that he has lost his job. Family-friendly fun it most definitely ain’t. But that’s only half the story, as the film they decided to shoot is surreal, subversive, and challenging on almost every level. So director Randall Moore and his skeleton cast and crew hit the Magical Kingdom and the Epcot Centre and shot an entire film guerilla-style under the nose of Mouse House security. That’s because most of the movie was shot at Disney’s Florida theme parks.
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