The Indonesian film that has been gaining immense popularity in the country, Sore: Wife from the Future, has now also been selected as Indonesia’s official selection for the International category of the Academy Awards. Adapted from Yandy Laurens’ (the director of the film) 2017 web series by the same name, the science fiction romance drama follows Jonathan, an almost-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 does have a few flaws in its character development and the science-fiction aspect, it still makes for a brilliantly touching watch, and is easily recommendable to fans of serious romantic cinema.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Divided into three parts, Sore: Wife from the Future begins with one titled ‘Jonathan,’ after the male protagonist whom we follow for almost the first half of the film. Currently on an expedition into the northernmost parts of the world, Jonathan, or Jo, spends most of his time walking through icy fields in search of appropriate subjects to capture. Jo is a photographer by profession, and he has a great time observing and clicking polar bears in the wild as he contemplates the changing weather patterns on our beloved Earth. While on the ship that he has been journeying on, the man is mostly seen either taking smoke breaks on the side deck by himself or simply sleeping in his small and evidently uncomfortable cabin.
Once Jo returns to his home in a Croatian city near Zagreb, he meets with his agent and only friend, Karlo, to discuss his next prospects. He is looking to impress a promoter named David, who can get Jo to more international exhibitions, but Karlo warns him that he must not show the photos of the polar bears, for they are currently representative of the adverse effects of climate change, a topic that David self-admittedly wants to steer clear of. Not really sure what to feel about this apparent dismissiveness for the planet, Jo returns home. He is a loner who cautiously stays away from most people, and is even a bit awkward when Karlo realizes that it is his birthday and wishes him well with a warm hug.
Therefore, it is absolutely shocking for Jo to wake up the next morning to the sight of an unknown woman sitting by him on his bed. What she says after being confronted is even more bizarre, as the woman claims to be Sore, his wife from the future. Jo is very confident that this is a practical joke being played on him by Karlo, and so he calls up the man, only to be told that he has had no part to play in any of this. When the woman refuses to go away, even after Jo is outright rude to her, and even keeps her outside his house throughout the night, with no food or protection from the cold, he does not have any option but to lend her an ear. This is when Sore states that she is here to ensure that her husband in the future abandons his unhealthy life choices, and thus begins a strange and loopy tale of love and acceptance.
Why does Jo start to take Sore seriously?
Jo is initially against the idea of taking Sore seriously, especially when she very directly causes his girlfriend, Elsa, to break up with him. But gradually he starts to listen to Sore’s words and follow them, also then growing close to her. There is a moment when he is almost about to kiss her and get intimate with her, only to be stopped by Sore, who reminds him that they had gotten close in such a manner only after their marriage, which is to take place many years in the future. Firstly, Jo does not really have any option but to entertain Sore, based on how she keeps following him around. But more importantly, Jo also internally realizes that whatever the woman is saying is helping him out in the short or the long run. He had been really skeptical about being with Elsa, as she wanted them to marry soon and move to her home in Madrid, which was really not something Jo wanted to do.
Then, before the meeting with David, Sore advises Jo to show him the photos he had taken in Ladakh instead of the ones from his recent trip to the Arctic. This works out too, as David loves the photos and arranges for an exhibition of Jo’s work almost immediately. Jo is simply bemused by the fact that Sore knew about the Ladakh photos, despite him never having told anyone about them. She is able to answer all the questions about his personal and professional life, as if he had really told her all of it some time in the future. The question of whether Sore is really from the future, which naturally crops up in Jo’s and also in our minds, is gradually answered with a resounding yes, for there is simply no way that she is lying about it all. This realization has a quick impact on Jo, as he cuts out smoking and drinking and replaces them with healthy habits like having fruits and exercising regularly.
It is actually very easy for Sore to take a significant position in the life of someone like Jo, who is a loner and yet gets easily attached and dependent on people. Jo is seemingly disconnected from his mother and elder sister and completely obsessed (in a way) with his father, who had left him and the family when he was just a young boy. It is only because he knows that his father had moved to Croatia to start a new family and that he now lives in Zagreb that Jo has even come so far from his home in Indonesia. It does feel like Sore quickly takes up the role of ‘family,’ or even ‘friend,’ in Jo’s life. But it all goes wrong when Jo sneaks out for a quick smoke one night, and Sore catches him in the act, realizing that she has been unable to change him. This is also when she reveals her true reason for having traveled to the past—Jo will end up dying eight years later from a severe heart attack caused by his unhealthy habits and stress, and so she wants to protect him from that fate. But then Sore herself dies, only for the film to reveal that there is a time loop that keeps forcing Sore to wake up beside Jo on his bed, demanding her to ensure that her future husband does change for the better.
What does Sore realize through her supernatural experiences?
Sore repeatedly tries to make Jo change his ways in each of the loops, only to end up dying each time because he finds some way to get back to his nasty habits. On one of the iterations, she even tries to go completely off the script and live her own life, getting a job at a clothing store in Zagreb and quite enjoying this change of pace. However, since she has not caused the breakup between Jo and Elsa in this reality, the couple comes into the same shop one day, looking for wedding outfits. They have an argument and end up leaving, but Sore quickly realizes that she cannot be without him, for she genuinely loves him in a way that transcends all boundaries 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 softly manipulate Jo into assuming the good habits that she feels will prevent his death eight years in the future, but in the process, she had only been making Jo feel stuck and cornered into doing things that he did not really want to do. Sore had been acting the same way as his girlfriend (ex in most of the realities), Elsa, who we see dominating him whenever she appears. In fact, Sore was also being as indirectly forceful as Jo’s father when he had suddenly left his family one day without any warning, making his young son accept and get used to his absence. With this realization, Sore changes her ways, as she talks about how Jo being alive matters to her, both at present and in the future, gradually making him realize the seriousness of the situation, and there is an instant impact. No longer does Jo sneak out to smoke or drink, and his wife from the future gets to spend more time with him.
Why does Sore’s plan fail in every way?
Sore now moves on to the next part of her plan, which is to make Jo meet his father in Zagreb, which is something that the man has been wanting to do for a long time but has not yet been able to do because of his fear, discomfort, and years of anguish. Her new technique of approaching the matter with compassion instead of striking fear in Jo’s mind works out perfectly, but then Sore starts to die repeatedly in the time loops mere minutes, or sometimes even seconds, before Jo meets his father. Her death in the iterations is directly connected to her feeling that her chance of changing Jo and preventing his death in the future is totally gone, meaning that she technically dies whenever she believes that she has failed in her mission. Since Sore feels that Jo will remain stressed and defensive in the future if he never meets his father and will therefore die, she feels she has lost her battle and ends up dying.
But the reason why Jo’s meeting with his father is delayed each time is random and quite bizarre, mostly due to a solar flare that causes the sky to glow red, which disrupts traffic systems and makes the couple late each time. It slowly dawns upon Sore that she is actually trying to fight against time, which is quite simply an impossible task. Even though she had been able to change her future husband’s mind about seeing his father to ease his pains, she cannot fight the waves of time, which want things to happen in a certain order. Sore understands that she has to let go of her love, even though it will cause her tremendous pain and wipe out her very existence from Jo’s life at present. It is only when she gives in to her fate, set by time, that Sore actually succeeds, although not instantly but eventually.
Do Sore and Jo get to be together?
Finally, Sore does not appear in the next time loop, and Jo gets on with living his life normally. Even though he used to have no recollection about the previous iterations earlier, he suddenly feels a certain yearning, a longing, to return home. In this while, he had also cut off all his ill habits and gone to his father’s house to leave him a note stating that he has truly forgiven the man for having abandoned him and the family. Sore accepting the fact that she cannot just force her way into ensuring that her future husband will live for longer had actually brought about the changes that she had wanted to bring for so long. As a result, Jo returns home and puts on an exhibition in Jakarta, and this is where 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 the two have flashes of their love from the past, and also technically their future, and they realize that they are just eternal lovers who have always been meant to be together.
Through these flashes, we get a more concrete idea about the beginning of the time loops, and it has to do with the very real fact that there is no single fixed time zone in the Arctic. Since most of the places in the North Pole follow the time zones of the respective countries closest to the region, this means that theoretically multiple time zones exist at the same place with no actual time zone at all. In the original timeline, Sore and Jo had met at the wedding of his elder sister and had fallen in love, then had their own marriage. Despite their strong love, their life together ended just a few years later, when Jo died from a heart attack. This was when Sore read about his visit to the Arctic and the peculiarity of the absence of any time zone at the place in his personal diary and decided to take the same trip. Sore: Wife from the Future suggests that this is when a time anomaly ensured that the both of them suddenly came together in a weird time loop that kept going on till Sore accepted her fate. But ultimately, Jo and Sore embrace each other at the exhibition in Jakarta, many years in the past (technically), and it is certain that they now get to be together finally.
What does the film actually mean?
Sore: Wife from the Future touches upon multiple aspects or thoughts of modern life, with the two most prominent ones being acceptance in love and the unconcern with regard to extremely serious matters like climate change. Although the film does adhere to a plot in which time loops exist and there is a circular pattern to the passage of time in the case of Sore’s situation, the crux of it is the realizations that Sore stumbles upon through her repeated experiences of the same events. After her numerous failed attempts to change the habits of her beloved Jo, she realizes that her approach has been wrong and that she needs to use more love and compassion to make him acknowledge and accept his flaws. Compassionate acceptance is the only way to change or reform anyone in any context. Then, when she tries to take a more sensitive and cautious approach, Sore realizes that she not only has to face off against both her and Jo’s headstrong attitudes, but also must compete against time itself, which is really an impossible task. This is why she keeps failing to reach the resolution that she had originally planned, and this is one more lesson that the film wants to impart. There is a need to accept not just each other, but more importantly, the trials and tribulations of time itself. It is only when she gives in to what seems to be the treachery of time that Sore ultimately manages to change Jo’s mind, although in an indirect manner, as she herself is no longer present.
Lastly, Yandy Laurens connects these realizations to the even more global and direct concerns regarding climate change, and particularly the seemingly unconcerned attitude that many still show towards the matter. As Jo says to Sore at the very end of the film, people can only realize what they are about to miss only if they truly understand what is at stake, which can only be taught through love and care. Just like he needed to feel the inexplicable longing for Sore, which he did not realize at the time, humans will also need to feel a similar yearning, and the associated pain, to set things straight with regard to climate conservation. In some ways, the director very soothingly wants to question the increasingly popular violent protests against climate change, it seems, but that is just my personal cheeky observation.
