By Robert Scucci
| Published
In Back to the Future, Marty McFly steals music from Chuck Berry, assuring everybody that their kids are going to love it. 2022’s LOLA steals this joke from Back to the Future, but this time we get a big band rendition of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” That could sound like lazy writing, but now that I think about it, it’s actually kind of brilliant.
The whole movie takes place in 1940s London, as World War 2 continues to escalate. Thanks to the titular device, a television set that can play broadcasts from the future, our protagonists may actually be aware of Back to the Future, and want to have their own moment paying homage to something nobody else knows exists.
It’s not all fun and games in LOLA, though, because we learn how dangerous precognition can actually be when you can simply turn on a TV and see how much the future changes once you start calling the shots. One day you’re stealing somebody’s intellectual property before they’re even known for it (or as I call it, “reverse plagiarism”), and the next you’re relaying military strategy to government officials, wondering if you could use the device to win the war with minimal casualties.
While I’ll admit that LOLA’s time travel logic is hard to wrap your head around, it wins some serious points as a period piece. If you didn’t know better and caught it on TV without any context, you might actually think it was a production from the 40s or 50s.
A New Way To Channel Surf
LOLA centers on two orphaned sisters named Thom (Emma Appleton) and Mars (Stefanie Martini), who live alone in the remote English countryside. Always the tinkerer, Thom realizes she’s created a time machine of sorts, but it’s not the kind that can transport physical matter. This particular time machine is a TV set that can watch broadcasts from the future, and the sisters mostly use it to discover new music. This is how Mars discovers David Bowie, and probably how Thom learns about The Kinks.
The sisters don’t use the device for much else until the threat of invasion breaks out around them, when they realize they can warn civilians about incoming raids, potentially saving thousands of lives. When discovered by the military, Thom and Mars are confronted by Lieutenant Sebastian Holloway (Rory Fleck Byrne), who, with the help of his superior, Cobcroft (Aaron Monaghan), grants them access to military frequencies.
Right away, we see the positive impact Thom and Mars have on the war. German strikes are intercepted, and countless casualties are prevented thanks to their LOLA device. But suddenly, David Bowie no longer exists, and Mars is horrified to learn that fascist pop sensation Reginald Watson (Shaun Boylan) is dominating the airwaves.
Making matters worse, when Mars and Lieutenant Holloway become romantically involved, Thom begins alienating them, often spending long stretches of time with her TV time machine, altering the future in ways that are irreversible and horrifying.
Brilliantly Shot
I’m not going to get too bogged down with the time travel semantics in LOLA because it sticks to its own internal logic, and it does it well. It doesn’t overexplain the causality chain, so you’re allowed to just sit back and watch how the characters cope with the kind of responsibility that’s been bestowed upon them.
What’s far more interesting is how LOLA was shot. It’s a strange mix of found footage and conventional filmmaking, shot entirely in black and white. While I would love to see how well this movie pops in full color, it’s better this way because of how archival footage is used. We get real shots of people in the streets, along with wartime footage from the 40s, all of which integrates seamlessly into the storytelling.
When I looked up the credits to see who was playing Hitler and Churchill because they looked like their identical twins, I was shocked to find out I was just watching real-life footage folded into this fiction to sell the illusion.
LOLA is a tight, 79-minute sci-fi thriller that has so much fun with its set and sound design. It feels like a piece of lost media in the best possible way, like writer-director Andrew Legge was actively working in the 50s, and this was his sci-fi revisionist history film about the previous decade. As of this writing, you can stream it for free on Tubi, and if you’re a fan of time travel paradoxes and classic rock, this one’s just begging to be watched.
