A confession: I’m in the middle of the “dog days” of Netflix film arrivals.  The movies I’ve really wanted to see I’ve either bought and/or seen by now and what I have on my Netflix Que are secondary choices.  By this I mean films that I’ve sniffed out that look interesting enough but are on my list until other films -the films I more want to see- arrive.

One such film is the 2013 mystery/sci-fi hybrid I’ll Follow You Down.  I truly cannot remember how this particular movie reached my awareness, only that I put it down on my list of films to see and about a month ago it arrived in the mail.  Because of a great many things that took up my time during the holidays, I wasn’t able to see it until yesterday.

I’ll Follow You Down features a grown up Haley Joel Osment (Sixth Sense) as Erol, an intellectual prodigy.  As a young boy, Erol’s equally gifted father (played by Rufus Sewell) mysteriously vanished without a trace after going to a physics conference.  Erol’s grandfather (Victor Gaber), turned out to be the last person to see him alive when he arrived at that conference and helped him bring some mysterious boxes to an abandoned room within the university where the conference was being held.

Erol’s father’s disappearance, we find as we fast forward a decade plus, has destroyed Erol’s mother (Gillian Anderson).  She is an emotional wreck who is reliant on medication she doesn’t want to take to stabilize herself.  The young adult Erol holds off going to MIT and getting on with his life because he feels he has to take care of his fragile mother.  Meanwhile, he is also dealing with his childhood sweetheart, also grown, and the life they may have for each other.

Into all this Erol’s grandfather reveals a startling theory he has as to what happened to Erol’s father…and the possibility that together they might just be able to find him and “set things right”.

I’m trying to dance around the central “big surprise” in this story but if you do even a cursory investigation of the movie’s plot that reveal will inevitably be made.  Still, you might enjoy the film a lot more if you let this surprise reveal come on its own.

Judging the film itself, I found it an entertaining and serious piece of work, even given the the more science fictional third act.  It seems the film’s makers gave a good deal of thought and effort in their presentation and for the most part it works despite the movie’s obvious low budget (I suspect they might have loved to use more effects toward the end).

The problem with the film is that it never reaches the suspenseful/emotional heights I also believe the film’s makers were trying to get to.  The material is presenting at times in an almost too clinical manner and the viewer is never quite as invested in the characters and situations as s/he should be.  Thus, despite plenty of good, I can only give this film a mild recommendation.  You shouldn’t regret seeing it, but the film doesn’t engage as much as it should.