“Site” (2025) is a convoluted mash up of time travel, reincarnation and domestic drama as a group of people’s lives are disrupted once high school friends, Neil (Jake McLaughlin) and his employer, Garrison (Theo Rossi), accept work at a former government facility to inspect it prior to converting it to a public school. After they are exposed to a machine that runs on tons of electricity and emits blue and white light, they experience hallucinations that feel like events that occurred during World War II and shed a light on Japanese atrocities against a Chinese family. With the help of college friend and journalist, Naomi (Miki Ishikawa), Neil tries to figure out how to save his family in the present day, stop the hallucinations and stop any others from being exposed to whatever phenomenon is occurring in that building. Will he succeed?
Neil is supposed to be a sympathetic protagonist, but the he feels like anything but, which is likely intentional and means that the audience is stuck with someone who is meh to root for. He is separated from his wife, Elena (Arielle Kebbel), missed his son’s swim meet, and exposes people that he cares about to danger repeatedly. He also acts as if killing a possum turns him into a hero. McLaughlin does his best to make Neil likeable, but at most, he elevates his character into more of a brand name everyman than someone who possesses characteristics which make him seem redeemable or magnetic. To be fair, no actor probably could. McLaughlin’s chemistry with other characters feels perfunctory and superficial though to be fair, Arielle Kebbel who plays Neil’s wife, Elena, is not given much to do other than seem initially entertained at her husband’s feeble attempts to impress her or aggrieved at his irresponsibility.
Instead of being seen as a man with a real grievance against Neil, Garrison presents as a morally dubious frenemy and pot stirrer. After chiding Neil for not being the best employee, Garrison encourages Neil to engage in bad behavior that will diminish Neil’s work quality further. He seems like a saboteur, not someone who seems concerned about Elena. Even Rossi’s innate charm and charisma cannot make Garrison interesting. Neil is a bit of a dolt, but it requires Herculean amounts of suspension of disbelief to buy that Garrison could fool anyone, even Neil, into thinking that they are friends as long as he did. If Garrison was a stand-up comedian, he would exclusively tell “Take my wife, please” jokes. The character is written so broadly that he may as well twirl his mustache.
Naomi is the closest that “Site” gets to a substantial character, and she is only introduced in the second act. Every storyline involving Naomi seems to have crucial bits of information left on the editing floor. When she is introduced, she is reporting racist harassment involving an article she wrote, but there are zero details to latch on to. Somehow, she and her husband, Andrew (Vince Foster), are good enough friends with Neil and Elena to own property together while simultaneously Andrew and Elena are dubious because apparently Neil and Naomi were an item in college. It is literally the most interesting thing about Neil. Also, there are allusions to why they broke up in college which involve her justified disapproving father, Ken (Clyde Kusatsiu). It gets regurgitated in bits and pieces, but it does not explain why they remained friends.
Writer and director Jason Eric Perlman may have made a common mistake when conceiving “Site.” He chose to center the character that he relates to the most, Neil, not the most interesting character, Naomi. There is a better, more feasible story where Naomi is looking for a lead, and her husband tips her off to Neil’s trouble so she heads down to investigate. Instead, Perlman takes the seventies sitcom narrative trope of misunderstanding, mistaken identity and false accusations to gin up some drama when there was already plenty embedded into the sci-fi plot. Even Perlman understands this on some level because she is the major focus of the denouement while Neil is nowhere to be found.
Each of these characters have roots in the past, and the point of the story is to uncover who they were, how they related to each other and how it impacts them in the present day. Perlman tries to tell three stories concurrently: the present around the facility, 1978 at the same location and 1931 Harbin, China. The last one involves a Chinese family who were tortured in Unit 731, which is an actual historical atrocity, but there were no survivors. While it is admirable to have the impulse to take the right side of history and create a fictional, sympathetic Chinese family at a time when hate crimes against Asian Americans spiked after the COVID-19 pandemic, this family is at best an impression, not fully developed. Also, there is a terrific, modest attempt at alternative history, which reimagines history as we wish it had happened, not as it had. The second timeline involves the scientists who create the mysterious machine and the accident that disrupted their lives. They get more trauma free backstory than the family, but not by much.
It will be interesting to see how South Korean and Chinese people will receive “Site” considering Japanese occupation directly impacted them, and they are usually the ones who tell such stories. There are no available details regarding how Perlman prepared to tell this story or strived for historical accuracy. It also may be controversial for a Japanese American character to play a more dominant role while the Chinese family’s story is not centered. The unwarranted horror opens up the film to accusations of exploitation because this movie does not feel as of belongs to that genre other than the graphic torture, which was historically worse than depicted. The Seventies storyline gets the shortest shrift.
Unfortunately, because the story in each timeline is so thin, and other than gender demographics, there is no soul deep similarities between the parallel characters, it does not land in a cathartic way even after it is spelled out Yes, you get some plot twists, but movies have to emotionally resonate, not just line up like a math equation. These characters needed to be recognizable regardless of which era that they were in, not just situational. I have an unofficial rule for filmmakers who try to tell layered stories: quality over quantity. Make one good story before telling another. Also “Site” involves a lot more telling than showing, which means prose dumping galore and without the benefit of rewinding and note taking, I would be lost and abandon caring.
Kudos to Perlman for using Hindu mythology, Indra, a god, instead of revisiting the same folklore wells. Unfortunately the reference is made so quickly and gets lost in the science talk that no one is going to remember anything about him.
“Site” is an ambitious, well-intentioned sci-fi thriller that fails to thrill. It bites off more than it could chew and needed better characters. Also, maybe I’m wrong because I peaced out of time travel storylines because like Danny Glover, I got too old to keep track of all these details, which is required for someone to comprehend the subgenre.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
Neil was Ichiro (Hiroshi Otaguro), the sadistic Japanese head of experiments, and Tobin Marris (Eric Whitten), the chief scientist in 1978, which explains why he was such an accident-prone mess. Why are we centering the bad guy in each timeline and trying to make him redemptive? Elena was Aravane (Neagheen Homaifar), who was Tobin’s colleague, girlfriend and pending baby mama. Neil and Elena’s son, Wiley (Carson Minniear)—why not Riley, for the love of God, was Guang (Corey Jung), the child in the Chinese family. Naomi was Xifeng (Danni Wang), the wife and mom in the Chinese family, Garrison was Jian (Yoson An), the husband and father in the Chinese family. Let me know if I got it. Initially I thought Neil was Jian, and Garrison was Ichiro because of the way their characters acted, but nope, which is ultimately why it got a thumbs down.
