“Think about the future,” Peter Roiter warns again and again. And he needs to know. Because he lived in the future until recently. From there, from the year 2062, he brings no good news with him to the present of the years 2022 (season 1) and 2023 (season 2) of this English-language science fiction podcast by Julio Rojas for the Spotify brand Gimlet, based on his Chilean original Case 63.
But is what Roiter says actually true? That he was a time traveler? And that the corona pandemic under which humanity has been groaning is only something like a slight hoarseness compared to what will happen on Earth from the 2030s?
Science fiction, especially in the cinema, is often synonymous with a lot of action and visual opulence. Case 63 On the other hand, “Case 63” is a chamber play, with long stretches of the conversation and argument between the psychotherapist Eliza Beatrix Knight and her patient Peter Roiter, who is initially just a number for her.
Roiter is not a classic time traveler; he moves without the possibility of returning
Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac play this couple who despair of each other. She because she can’t believe what he’s telling her and at the same time she can’t easily pathologize him. He because he depends on their trust in him to steer various developments into better paths for humanity.
Two voices attacking each other, each wanting to dominate the other – and yet harmonizing with each other. Moore and Isaac play the bewilderment and strangeness of their characters and their simultaneous fascination for each other seemingly casually and yet extremely precisely.
It turns out, if you want to believe him, that Roiter is not capable of time travel in the classic sense, i.e. not able to jump to this year and then to that year. Rather, he – and not only he – can exist in different timelines. However, only in one, and after changing to a new one, without the possibility of returning to the old one.
Like an onion, the listener peels away layer by layer, hoping, unlike the vegetable, to find a core in which a way out of the existential threat to humanity is hidden. What you first come across is the real reason why the man went back forty years into the past. Then you realize with great surprise what is really dear and dear to him.
Case 63Spotify.