Darth Vader does not say “Luke, I am your father” in The Empire Strikes Back. The ghosts in Field of Dreams do not command “If you build it, they will come.” Forrest Gump’s iconic line is not “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Mr. Rogers never opened his show by announcing that it’s “a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” These are facts, and yet if you disagree, you may be suffering from the “Mandela Effect,” a strange happening in which many people have the same wrong memory of a given cultural, political, or social detail.
Over the past few years, the Mandela Effect has inspired copious articles, message board threads, and online videos. Now, it receives the feature film treatment courtesy of The Mandela Effect Phenomenon, a documentary that not only formally resembles a conspiracy-minded YouTube post, but is about as reliable and convincing as one.
Premiering on VOD on July 9, The Mandela Effect Phenomenon is an examination of its seemingly bizarre subject via interviews with a grand total of two people, Sun Journal journalist Mark LaFlamme and author and “Mandela Effect researcher” Jacob Israel, neither of whom proves authoritative or persuasive. LaFlamme and Israel are the primary voices heard in this rambling and repetitive 90-minute affair from writer/director Robert Kiviat, who otherwise pads his runtime with cheesy 1990s-grade computer graphics and dramatic-recreation clips that look like they were taken from a workplace training video. The result is a film designed for those who enjoy their supernatural nonsense served with a healthy side of multiverse mumbo jumbo and topped off with a dash of paranoid The Matrix fantasy.
