When you watch direct tv, you’ll find tons of movies you might have never heard of before. When you give new movies a try, you might find one like Phantasma Ex Machina, a movie where a boy builds a machine to make people come back from the dead. Interested? Here’s a plot review!
Cody (played by Sasha Andreev), the hero of “Phantasma Ex Machina”, desperately wants to make a machine that can bridge the gap between the living and the dead. He feels deep guilt and grief after his parents die in a car crash.
He had to drop out of college to look after his little brother, James (played by Max Hauser). Cody builds a modified Van der Graaf generator which doesn’t seem to work, no one comes back from the dead. However, Tom (played by Matthew Feeney), the engineer who sold him some parts, gets a sudden and inconvenient visit from a dead wife. Tom steals the machine and tries to get it to work, but his efforts only result in more chaos. The chaos spills over into the lives of the neighbors. Cody manages to bring back a mother, but not his mother (the dead lady and her son lived in the house before Cody’s family moved in).
Tom’s dead wife comes back to do the dishes and spend the night with her husband right at the time when he wants to connect with a new girlfriend. The ghosts aren’t filmy, translucent beings, but real people, with the odd habits and actions of real people. Some of the neighbors can see the newly visible dead, but others can’t and the chaos begets violence. One character gets angry and whacks another over the head with a shovel.
The film shows the depth of the characters guilt, obsession and grief as Cody and James try to get the machine to work. The actors do well with their parts, showing emotion without overdoing it. The theme of the movie gets genuinely sensitive treatment. Maybe it’s not best that we get to meet after death to settle things.