The Indonesian film that has gained immense popularity in the country, Sore: Wife from the Future, has been selected as Indonesia's official submission for the International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards. Adapted from the 2017 web series of the same name, directed by Yandy Laurens (the film's director), this romantic science fiction drama follows Jonathan, a reclusive Indonesian photographer living in a remote corner of Croatia, when he is suddenly visited by a woman who claims to be his wife from the future. Although Sore: Wife from the Future has some flaws in its character development and science fiction aspects, it remains a moving film and highly recommended for lovers of serious romantic cinema.
Divided into three parts, Sore: Wife from the Future begins with a section titled "Jonathan," after the male protagonist, whom we follow for almost the first half of the film. Currently on an expedition to the northernmost regions of the world, Jonathan, or Jo, spends most of his time walking across icy fields searching for suitable subjects to photograph. Jo is a photographer by profession and enjoys observing and photographing polar bears in their natural habitat while reflecting on climate change on our planet. On the ship he is traveling on, he is mostly seen smoking alone on the side deck or sleeping in his small and evidently uncomfortable cabin.
Director: Yandy Laurens
Writer: Yandy Laurens
Stars: Sheila Dara Aisha, Dion Wiyoko, Goran Bogdan
Once Jo returns home to a Croatian town near Zagreb, he meets with his agent and only friend, Karlo, to discuss his upcoming projects. He hopes to impress a promoter named David, who could get him more international exhibitions, but Karlo warns him against showing the polar bear photos, as they depict the adverse effects of climate change, a topic that David, by his own admission, prefers to avoid. Unsure what to make of this apparent indifference to the planet, Jo returns home. He is a loner who keeps to himself, and even seems a little uncomfortable when Karlo realizes it's his birthday and congratulates him with a warm hug.
Therefore, it's absolutely shocking for Jo to wake up the next morning and see a strange woman sitting next to him in bed. What she says after being confronted is even stranger, as the woman claims to be Sore, his wife from the future. Jo is convinced it's a prank by Karlo, so he calls him, only for Karlo to tell him he has nothing to do with it. When the woman refuses to leave, even after Jo is rude to her and even leaves her outside his house all night without food or protection from the cold, he has no choice but to listen to her. That's when Sore claims she's there to make sure her future husband abandons his unhealthy lifestyle habits, and thus begins a strange and convoluted love story of acceptance and self-discovery.
Initially, Jo resists taking Sore seriously, especially when she directly causes his girlfriend, Elsa, to break up with him. But gradually, he begins to listen to Sore's words and follow them, and also to bond with her. There's a moment when he's about to kiss her and become intimate with her, but Sore stops him, reminding him that they only became that close after their marriage, which will take place many years in the future. At first, Jo has no choice but to heed Sore's advice, given her insistence on following him. But, more importantly, Jo also realizes that what the woman is saying is helping him in the short and long term. He had been very skeptical about his relationship with Elsa, as she wanted them to get married soon and move to her house in Madrid, something Jo didn't want at all.
Then, before the meeting with David, Sore advises Jo to show him the photos he took in Ladakh instead of those from his recent trip to the Arctic. This also works, as David loves the photos and organizes an exhibition of Jo's work almost immediately. Jo is simply baffled by the fact that Sore knows about the photos from Ladakh, even though he had never told anyone about them. She is able to answer all his questions about his personal and professional life, as if he had actually told her everything at some point in the future. The question of whether Sore truly comes from the future, which naturally arises in Jo's mind and also in ours, is gradually answered with a resounding yes, as there is simply no way she could be lying. This revelation has an immediate impact on Jo, who quits smoking and drinking and replaces them with healthy habits like eating fruit and exercising regularly.
In reality, it's very easy for Sore to occupy an important place in the life of someone like Jo, who is lonely but easily attaches himself to and becomes dependent on people. Jo seems estranged from his mother and older sister, and is completely obsessed (in a way) with his father, who abandoned him and his family when he was just a child. Jo has only traveled so far from his home in Indonesia because he knows his father moved to Croatia to start a new family and now lives in Zagreb.
Sore quickly seems to assume the role of "family" or even "friend" in Jo's life. But everything goes wrong when Jo sneaks out one night to smoke a cigarette, and Sore discovers him, realizing she hasn't been able to change him. It is then that she reveals the real reason she traveled to the past: Jo will die eight years later from a severe heart attack caused by his unhealthy habits and stress, so she wants to protect him from that fate. But then Sore dies, and the film reveals that there is a time loop that forces Sore to repeatedly wake up next to Jo in his bed, demanding that she ensure her future husband changes for the better.
Sore repeatedly tries to get Jo to change his habits in each of the loops, but ends up dying each time because he finds some way to revert to his bad habits. In one of the iterations, she even tries to completely go off-script and live her own life, getting a job at a clothing store in Zagreb and enjoying this change of pace. However, since in this reality she hasn't caused the breakup between Jo and Elsa, the couple walks into the same store one day, looking for wedding outfits.
They argue and end up leaving, but Sore quickly realizes that she can't live without him, because she truly loves him in a way that transcends all barriers of time and space. Soon, she also understands why she has been failing for so long, and this has to do with her approach. Sore had been trying to warn, threaten, and subtly manipulate Jo into adopting good habits that, according to her, would prevent his death eight years in the future, but in the process, she had only succeeded in making Jo feel trapped and cornered, forced to do things he didn't really want to do.
Sore was behaving in the same way as his girlfriend (ex-girlfriend in most realities), Elsa, whom we see dominating him whenever she appears. In fact, Sore was also being just as indirectly authoritarian as Jo's father when he abandoned his family one day without warning, forcing his young son to accept and get used to his absence. Realizing this, Sore changes her strategy and talks to Jo about how important it is to her that he be alive, both in the present and in the future, gradually making him understand the gravity of the situation, and the impact is immediate. Jo stops sneaking off to smoke or drink, and his future wife is able to spend more time with him.
Sore then moves on to the next part of her plan: getting Jo to reunite with his father in Zagreb, something the man has long desired but has been unable to do due to his fear, discomfort, and years of anguish. Her new technique of approaching the matter with compassion instead of instilling fear in Jo's mind works perfectly, but then Sore begins to die repeatedly in the time loops, mere minutes, or even seconds, before Jo meets his father.
Her death in the iterations is directly related to the feeling that her opportunity to change Jo and prevent his death in the future has completely vanished, meaning she technically dies every time she believes she has failed in her mission. Since Sore feels that Jo will remain stressed and defensive in the future if he never reunites with his father and will therefore die, she feels she has lost the battle and ends up dying. But the reason Jo's meeting with her father is repeatedly delayed is random and quite bizarre, mainly due to a solar flare that causes the sky to turn red, disrupting traffic systems and causing the couple to be late each time.
Gradually, Sore realizes that she is actually trying to fight against time itself, which is simply an impossible task. Although she had managed to convince her future husband to visit his father to alleviate his suffering, she cannot fight against the inexorable passage of time, which dictates that things happen in a specific order. Sore understands that she must give up her love, even though this causes her immense pain and completely erases her from Jo's life at that moment. Only when she resigns herself to her fate, dictated by time, does Sore finally triumph, not immediately, but eventually.
Finally, Sore does not appear in the next time loop, and Jo continues living his life normally. Although he previously didn't remember the previous iterations, he suddenly feels a certain longing, a yearning to return home. During this time, he had also abandoned all his bad habits and had gone to his father's house to leave him a note saying that he had truly forgiven him for abandoning him and his family.
The fact that Sore accepted that she couldn't force things to ensure her future husband lived longer brought about the changes she had so desired. As a result, Jo returns home and organizes an exhibition in Jakarta, and it is there that he and Sore (the characters in this reality) meet for the first time. Something magical happens when they shake hands for the first time, as they both have glimpses of their past love, and technically also their future, and realize that they are eternal lovers who were always destined to be together.
Through these glimpses, we get a more concrete idea about the beginning of the time loops, and it has to do with the actual fact that there is no fixed time zone in the Arctic. Since most places at the North Pole follow the time zones of the countries closest to the region, this means that, theoretically, multiple time zones exist in the same place, without there being an actual time zone. In the original timeline, Sore and Jo met at his older sister's wedding and fell in love, later getting married. Despite their great love, their life together ended a few years later when Jo died of a heart attack. It was then that Sore read in his personal diary about his trip to the Arctic and the peculiarity of the absence of a time zone in that place, and decided to make the same trip.
Sore: Wife of the Future suggests that it was then that a temporal anomaly caused them both to suddenly find themselves in a strange time loop that continued until Sore accepted her fate. But ultimately, Jo and Sore embrace at the Jakarta exhibition, many years in the past (technically), and it's certain that they can finally be together now. Sore: Wife from the Future addresses multiple aspects and reflections of modern life, the two most prominent being acceptance in love and indifference to extremely serious issues such as climate change. While the film adheres to a plot with time loops and a circular pattern in the course of time in Sore's case, the heart of the story lies in the revelations she discovers through the repetition of the same events.
After numerous failed attempts to change her beloved Jo's habits, she realizes that her approach has been wrong and that she needs to use more love and compassion for him to acknowledge and accept his flaws. Compassionate acceptance is the only way to change or reform someone in any context. Then, in attempting a more sensitive and cautious approach, Sore realizes that she not only has to contend with both of their stubbornness but also must compete against time itself, a truly impossible task. This is why she fails to achieve the resolution she had originally planned, and this is another lesson the film wants to convey. It is necessary to accept not only each other but, more importantly, the trials and tribulations of time. Only when she surrenders to what seems to be the betrayal of time does Sore finally manage to change Jo's mind, albeit indirectly, since she herself is no longer present.
Finally, Yandy Laurens connects these reflections to even more global and direct concerns about climate change, and in particular, the apparent indifference that many still show towards this problem. As Jo tells Sore at the end of the film, people can only realize what they are about to lose if they truly understand what is at stake, something that can only be taught through love and care.
Just as he needed to feel the inexplicable longing for Sore, which he didn't recognize at the time, human beings will also need to feel a similar longing, and the associated pain, to correct the situation regarding climate preservation. In a way, the director seems to subtly question the increasingly popular violent protests against climate change, but that's just a personal observation.
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