Naïve Casper has obviously been blessed with good luck rather than brains. When he arrives through the time-portal thingy, fate delivers him to Holly, a hard-partying underachiever, who finds his future-talk amusing. Being a failed-activist millennial, she is sufficiently inconsequential to history, allowing her to serve as Casper’s front for placing sports bets (a lot of hockey, since they are in Canada) and buying lottery tickets.
Life becomes quite enjoyably meaningless for both, at least for a while. Unbeknownst to them, Doris, an enforcer from the future stationed in the current time-period, is always on the lookout for potentially disruptive time-travelers like Casper. Given his knowledge of cataclysmic future events, Casper is fairly confident he cannot mess things up too badly. However, his obsession with Percy Sullivan, a darkly cynical cartoonist, leads to trouble. In the future, Sullivan will be a popular cult icon for fans like Casper, who cannot resist crashing his “celebrated” suicide. Perversely, all that might change when Sullivan refuses to continue after Casper’s rude interruption.
The feature-length Relax grew out of Higginson’s short, which focused on Casper fateful meeting with Sullivan. In fact, this is the point where the feature starts getting good. The first act is largely a hodge podge of Casper’s buffoonery and a lot of radically-charged whining from Holly and her fellow lesbian friends. In contrast, Casper’s dilemma as to what to do about a still-living Sullivan constitutes a rather clever and darkly comic time-travel problem, which continues to compound in increasingly outrageous ways.
After half-an-hour or so of meandering, Relax becomes an entertaining (and in some ways even smart) time-travel comedy. Recommended for fans of time-travel with the patience to wait out the slow start, Relax, I’m from the Future is now playing in New York, at the AMC Empire.
