Some home invaders have orders to take the machine, though none of them know why at the outset.Īs it turns out, the machine is more than a solution to our dependency on fossil fuels. He is now in hiding while working diligently on the titular ARQ, a massive turbine engine that he believes can create an infinitely replenishing energy source. Here’s a cheat sheet for the movie, which cleverly avoids much early or direct exposition: Renton is an engineer who escaped the clutches of a massive and evil corporation bent on world domination.

“It’s a better form of storytelling and people get more engaged that way instead of being spoon-fed.”

“My tastes are to be given some mystery and fill things in, and just learn the story in the way that the characters do,” Elliott told Inverse at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film premiered over the weekend. The audience doesn’t realize it at first, either, and it takes endless iterations of the same hellish day for Renton, his kinda-sorta ex-girlfriend Hannah (Rachael Taylor), and viewers to figure out what the hell is going on. Written and directed by Orphan Black and Hunters writer/story editor Tony Elliott, the film stars Robbie Amell ( The Flash and Tomorrow People) as a scientist who, without fully realizing it, invents a limited-scope time machine. There have been plenty of single-location movies and quite a few Groundhog Day-style reliving-the-same-day features, but ARQ combines both tropes into a cramped genre all its own. If you find yourself feeling claustrophobic and a little loopy while watching ARQ, just imagine what it was like to make the new Netflix sci-fi thriller.

The movie arq