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Site, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2025

Plots involving time travel are difficult enough for storytellers to make sense of, so it's quite a shock to see how little sense writer/director Jason Eric Perlman's Site actually makes. That's not only in terms of the time-travel gimmick itself, which also brings secret government experiments and a horrific World War II-era prison and reincarnation into the mix. It also has to do with the fundamentals of who these characters are, what their relationships are to each other, and why they become caught up in this mess of a story as some sort of karmic punishment in the first place.

Perlman seems to have sacrificed a lot of basic exposition to focus more on the science-fiction components of this story. We might understand that rationale if the pseudo-science and the metaphysical angle of the story were sound. They're not, so the experience of watching the movie is of trying to piece together a puzzle with several missing parts and where the assembled pieces don't quite match the picture on the box.

The story follows Neil (Jake McLaughlin), a guy who works at a real estate firm or something like it under his best-friend boss Garrison (Theo Rossi). Garrison has a new deal to make, involving a property that was once a top-secret government research facility—complete with a super-duper-secret laboratory in a basement that's nowhere in the building's blueprints. The two men power up the electricity to the building, head down to the basement, and turn on some kind of device that creates some sort of wormhole that somehow connects present-day anonymous U.S. city to the infamous Unit 731. It was a prison camp operated by the Japanese Army in occupied Manchuria, circa the late 1930s or so.

What does Neil—a bland American guy with vague marital, personal, and professional issues—have to do with both the scientist who ran that time-and-space-jumbling experiment and a Chinese man whose entire family is imprisoned in Unit 731? That's the question, and if Perlman has an answer, he's keeping it close to the chest, even after the movie apparently gives us all the information it possibly can in order to resolve that mystery.

The mystery itself is, at least, kind of intriguing. After being exposed to the glowing-blue whatsit in the lab, Neil and Garrison start having visions of that imprisoned family whenever they make a physical connection with each other or, sometimes, just randomly so that the plot can move forward.

The historical hallucinations cause more problems between Neil and his former/estranged wife Elena (Arielle Kebbel), especially when a vision causes him to crash a motorbike into a low-hanging branch. The accident injures the eyes of his son Wiley (Carson Minniear), and because they don't have the health insurance or cash to cover a transplant, the couple has to figure out a way to pay for treatment.

That brings Naomi (Miki Ishikawa) and Andrew (Vince Foster), co-owners with Neil and Elana of a boat, into the plot. She's Neil's ex-girlfriend from college, who was either the target of a racially based assault or involved in a car accident or had something else happen back then because of Neil. It's also possible the two had an affair recently, which might be the reason Elena kicked her husband out of the house. Andrew sure seems to imply that an affair happened, too, but if that and his obvious antagonism toward Neil are the case, why does he even become involved in this whole mess?

Again, much of this stuff is left to suggestions in the screenplay. There's subtle storytelling, and then, there's whatever Perlman's approach is here. It's either to assume the audience is attuned to the filmmaker's storytelling assumptions or to not care about clearly communicating basic character details, because the movie's bigger-picture ideas take precedence.

As for the bigger picture, it's a mess, too, and also filled with more suggestions than straightforward facts. A turning point comes when Neil and Naomi, who happily joins her ex/friend/recent lover/who-cares-at-this-point in the facility and also starts having visions, find Ronith (Kavi Raz), the only survivor of the decades-old disaster at the secret lab. His explanation is a hodgepodge of jargon and drowned out by the soundtrack's ominous score. It must be a very good explanation, though, or it is in Perlman's mind, at least, because it's pretty much all we obtain.

The obvious ambitions of Site get the better of its foundational storytelling, basically. There's the outline of a potentially thoughtful and clever piece of science fiction here, but the resulting movie feels just like that—an outline in need of a lot of development.

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