Frequencies (film)

"I've seen a pattern: O. X. V."

"Everything has a side-effect. My whole lifes a side-effect."

"Ironic particle: the physical manifestation of irony existing latent in every atom in the universe. But my preliminary research suggests that the ironic particles are only activated by the brain when we want something, and so forming a "desire chain"—but only by a certain type of person."

"I changed my frequency."

"What we know about frequency is wrong. Otherwise, you and I would never have met."

"Nature needs constant nurturing."

"Greeting or serious question?"

"I don't feel. No one wants to understand. I know what they call me—"the Machine"—and they're right. I do not love my family. I experience no joy. If you ever see me smile, frown, laugh, or cry, I'm pretending, waiting for it to become real; but it never will. It's the side-effect."

"I feel…connected…to myself."

"I have a 210 I.Q. I never needed to take notes. I just didn't want to always have to look at people or have them looking at me. It's the eyes."

"I've never waited for a train before."

"You have to have choice."

"It's okay, they've used up their minute for this year already; we couldn't get them together now if we tried."

"Frequency does not change."

"What I am interested in is the universal…symphony."

"That's it. Perfect. Oh. I see."

"Various: Knowledge determines destiny."

"Mrs. Fortune: [to Isaac-Newton "Zak" Midgeley] You steal people's frequencies."

"Mr. Strauss: When Mozart plays, we are all the same frequency."

"The world's first Scientific-Philosophical romance."

"Like youth itself, the opening of Frequencies—an uncommonly ambitious science-fiction romance—is sparkling and unsettling at once."

"Better still, it's elegant and moving. It generates its own resonance."

"Fisher never subordinates his big ideas to the usual chase scenes or manufactured love conflicts less confident filmmakers use to candy up such material. That's great—too bad that, in the final third, the movie also doesn't subordinate those ideas to its own story, or to its earlier elegance of construction. Instead the ideas swell up, multiply like Tribbles, and finally encompass mind control, ancient conspiracies, questions of free will versus determinism, and what your brain is doing when it somehow knows a melody it's never heard before."

"The promise of Surrealism is that there is no explanation. But the gentle mysteries of such imagery gives way to gushing précis of everything much later on, the connections between Mozart and a government cover-up and the science-fair projects the leads conducted a decade before all laid out in monologues."

"While the detached, deadpan tone and occasionally stilted acting might leave some viewers flat, there’s no doubting the fierce intelligence behind this admirable puzzle box of a movie."

"Are you hungry for true ideas-fueled science fiction? Do you lament that we so rarely see such things in movies? Then here is a film to warm the cockles of your geeky heart. For here we have a low-budget—I'm gonna guess ultra-low-budget—little British tale from a slightly parallel universe where everyone has a "frequency.""

"Frequencies ends up, electrifyingly, in an insanely bonkers and kind of amazing place where words have literally power and free will and creativity are up in the air. This is incredibly ambitious and profoundly provocative science fiction drama that you must see if you value thought as much as you do action in your cinema."

"Frequencies is a detached film, with a tone that takes some warming up to. The narrative takes place at a deliberate distance from the audience, leaving us silent observers even more than most films."

"The film touches on a lot of themes—class inequality, determinism and free will—but it most speaks to the part of us that wants to believe that we can live outside of our potential. This is a story of a boy who's told again and again that he can't be who he wants to be, can't do what he wants to do, can't love who he wants to love—and he devotes himself, body, mind and soul, to the pursuit of dissolving those barriers. In doing so, Zak not only belies the debate of nature versus nurture, he proves that sheer will can overcome the mightiest of obstacles."

"It's a romance and a philosophical experiment, and it's also a science fiction film of the best kind: one that favors ideas over special effects. Fisher creates a fully-realized new world in Frequencies, and he does it with words and concepts instead of computer graphics and creatures."

"Fisher's intelligent and imaginative narrative revisits key scenes from different, ever wider perspectives—and will leave viewers mentally revisiting them for days afterwards as they try to disentangle what is at once a star-crossed romance, an allegory of (class) discord and (musical) harmony, and a theological investigation into nature and nurture, free will and determinism."

"Daniel Fraser — Isaac-Newton "Zak" Midgeley"

"Eleanor Wyld — Marie-Curie Fortune"

"Owen Pugh — Theodor-Adorno "Theo" Strauss"