FLUXX - Mark Reviews Movies

Fluxx, The Forge

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 29, 2025

Director Brendan Gabriel Murphy and Keyaunte Mayfield's screenplay for Fluxx begins with an intriguing mystery. A woman awakens in a bathtub, receives a vaguely threatening call from a little girl, and discovers that she cannot leave her house. Whenever she even steps outside the walls of the place, the woman finds herself right back in the tub.

The big question, then, is what's happening here. Is it just a dream? Has the woman suffered some sort of mental breakdown? Is she trapped in some kind of science-fiction scenario, such as the one that was the foundation of one of the movies she starred in before this strange occurrence? Yes, Vada (Shelley Hennig) is an actress, by the way, whose career has hit a wall and might not have been as successful as she would have wanted it to be in the first place. The movie becomes about that more than the possibilities of its nifty setup.

That's far too bad, because the flashback structure of the script constantly interrupts the puzzle of the initial premise and the sense of discovery as Vada keeps trying to find ways to cheat whatever mental, physical, or maybe metaphysical maze in which she's trapped. The construction of the screenplay might have been understandable, if not for the fact that Vada's life up until this point—whatever it may be—is one big cliché, played as unconvincing melodrama.

Most of her problems—apart from the obvious and most compelling one of her being stuck inside this house and forced to figure out something—seem to stem from her relationship with fellow actor Trevor (Shiloh Fernandez). The first flashback here throws us right into Vada's romantic life, seeing her try to reconcile something with ex-boyfriend and tabloid talk show host Calvin (Tyrese Gibson) before finding Trevor outside. She swipes his cigarette, hops on the back of his motorcycle, and, after their very first meeting in that moment, rides with him to some level of fame as a regular on a daytime soap opera.

Meanwhile, things at the house become even more confounding. The girl keeps calling, hinting that Vada is indeed dreaming, having a nervous breakdown, and stuck in this house in the Hollywood Hills until she can figure out why all of this is happening. The dialogue is basically the expository equivalent of begging the question—giving us every possible answer as the correct one so that Murphy and Mayfield can do whatever they want with it.

That includes the sort-of time-loop gimmick, which turns out not to be one at all since the clock keeps ticking toward some event about to happen, and the introduction of other characters into Vada's dream/hallucination. One is a masked killer like a figure from a slasher movie, and another is a different version of Vada, named Raven and also played by Hennig with a pseudo-Australian accent. Is this iteration who she was before her acting career, some alternative variation from a timeline/dimension/whatever in which she never became an actress, or a peek into some hidden part of Vada's psyche? It could be any of them, which is to say, just like the entire premise of the house as a kind of mental or preternatural prison, it might as well be all of them.

The questions of this movie are far more intriguing than its answers, which are either too imprecise to make sense or, by the end, too obvious to really care how the story arrives at them. The biggest issue with the script, perhaps, is that the screenwriters appear to have trapped themselves within it, since there isn't much for Vada to do in the house but to try and fail to escape, restart the entire scenario, and repeat the process with a couple of variations along the way.

That means most of the story revolves around those flashbacks, which trace Vada's acting career rising to a certain level, Trevor's own work in the industry exceeding her own, and the couple arguing about professional and personal jealousies. Trevor is, after all, more successful than Vada, and she starts to suspect that he might be sleeping around on her, as well. Things take a very bad turn, both for the relationship and the ambling narrative, during an extended section that features Trevor trying to direct a movie of his own, starring Vada as an android under the lessening control of Trevor's character.

None of this is particularly insightful about the characters, since the premise demands that we question what's real and what is Vada's own potentially warped impression of herself. Fluxx definitely isn't thoughtful about the price of fame, either, since the whole bland back story builds to a revelation that attempts to shock but only reveals how much the filmmakers have been toying with us.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products