FORGET SPORTS ALMANACS AND ALMOST KISSING your mum – Marty McFly’s dealings with the Doc in Back To The Future feel tame compared to The Butterfly Effect. It’s perhaps the darkest time-travel movie ever committed to celluloid, with an alternate ending so harrowing that it still keeps people up at night despite 20 years having passed since it first hit cinemas.
Released in 2004, this sci-fi drama had then-rising star Ashton Kutcher playing Evan, a young man with a very troubled past that saw him and his pals enduring a torrent of abuse. From parental violence and encounters with a paedophilic neighbour, to accidentally causing the death of a mother and her baby and witnessing the torture of the family dog, it was a grim period that all involved would rather forget.
It’s convenient, then, that when Evan reads from his old journals he discovers that he can travel back in time, inhabit the body of his younger self during blackout periods and change the way history happened. However, what starts as an inexplicable way of fixing everyone’s problems quickly descends into a recipe for disaster, as each
