A strange woman comes to your door, seemingly on the brink of tears, rambling about being followed. You’re an average male, you do the only thing you can — let her in and ask if she needs to call someone for help. Soon, however, she’s brandishing a gun and apologizing. She has to kill you. She has to pass on the curse. She fires a bullet into your head.
You wake up. You see your own body lying on the floor. This doesn’t make any sense. The gun is in your hand. Long blonde hair frames your face. Your hands look different — smaller, more delicate. And are those — gasp — boobs? This can’t be happening… body-swaps are impossible, right? Well, not according to the note that’s been left in the woman’s purse, which tells you where to go – back to her house, where more answers — and questions — await.
You now have The Curse. You have a few weeks to kill somebody and take over their body. The only way out is to pass the curse along, offering them your body by killing yourself, which is what that woman, Christine, did to you.
What then? Drinking won’t make it go away. Sulking about it. Sleeping. You are in this body and you have a choice to make — kill or be killed. (Don’t ask what happens if you do neither.) Either way, you have to live, a little while longer.
What happens next? Many of you reading this are writers, and others accomplished readers, so you should be able to come up with something. Viewers might like to see our ex-man interact with his surroundings in his new body. See how the world treats a woman. Face some of the social connections and obligations Christine had, find ways that that experience conflicts with his own, all while plotting his next move, whatever that may be: to explore the premise of, you know, a man magically transported into a woman’s body.
Except that’s not what happens in Soul Traveler, a movie that is ostensibly a TG bodyswap story, but is remarkably uninterested in anything titillating, voyeuristic, observational or farcical about its ostensible premise. The movie actually has superficial similarities to The Trading Post — a “curse” that forces one person to live another life, and then another, and so on, (complete with a letter and copious notes from one previous inhabitant!) — but if anything it illustrates the ingenuity Jason and his collaborators used when they set the blog up years ago by lacking any of that storytelling drive.
I found this movie on Amazon Prime when I was told about another film, Whatever, Ever After. Unfortunately, that one is only available in the United States and the UK, and I’m Canadian, so I had to settle for the “similar titles.” I wasn’t exactly expecting Citizen Kane, but it was worse than I had imagined.
Eric, the man who becomes Christine, doesn’t do anything except waddle about awkwardly in some heels until he meets the next person he has decided he has to kill. We don’t know anything about Eric other than that he was a blue-collar joe, and that he smoked and sometimes did push-ups. We can assume, because he’s a man, that he does not want to be a woman, and that he’d like to use this curse to reclaim his original sex.
Instead, he finds Anita, a woman who is, at the very least, younger and prettier than Christine. No indication is given as to why Eric chose Anita, other than she appears to be the first person who would talk to him, and possibly is the only other person who lives in their town. He kills himself/Christine in front of her, freeing his soul to enter her body and ejecting hers into, I don’t know, the netherworld or whatever. Then he walks around as Anita and the entire process begins again, except this time with nicer clothes.
Here’s a movie that can’t think of a single interesting thing that might happen if a man were cursed to possess a woman’s body. Nothing funny, nothing sexy, nothing to problematize the situation. No idea what you would do, what you could do, or what you would have to do if you were in that situation. It’s also not really interested in the horrifying existential and moral quandary at the center of its plot, with the sadistic spree of murders and suicides. The only thing to buoy this weirdly stagnant film is that along with Anita’s body, Eric has inherited a host of psychological issues she was suffering, and for which she was taking a large number of prescription medications. He goes to see Anita’s psychiatrist, and he can tell that she’s not herself — but seemingly it wouldn’t be the first time.
That’s not un-interesting, but it’s not as though the movie does anything with it, because Eric is already on the lookout for his next body, this time a male one. He chooses Lance, a nice Hispanic boy with an ailing mother and a complicated on-again-off-again relationship with a woman who seems to follow him everywhere. Other side plots involve a Detective with weird vibes looking for Eric’s killer, an unhoused person who seems to have figured out what’s going on, and the way-too-involved psychiatrist Dr. Argus, but in naming all of these things I’m making this movie sound more active and interesting than it is. Worse than being bad, it’s dull.
I’m a huge fan of bad movies — I love seeing how a film production can go fascinatingly wrong, but even I had a hard time sitting through this. To say Soul Traveler is The Room of TG fiction would not be inaccurate, as far as script coherence and production values goes, but it would also be paying this movie way too high of a compliment when it comes to bombast and ambition. Tommy Wiseau at least wanted desperately, if hopelessly, to make some kind of masterpiece, so he swung big. Writer-director-actor Pamela Sutch, who plays the Christine body (badly, sorry Pam), creates an entirely inert world populated only by two or three people at a time, all of whom are just there to play out the same ritual over and over, sometimes interspersed with heady faux-philosophizing about the nature of a soul. It looks like a high school student film from the 2000s shot on digital camcorder, whenever the actors were available, in their own homes. Seasons change between scenes with characters going from parkas to t-shirts. The whole thing builds to a messy climax involving another body mix-em-up, the return of “Christine,” and a little dose of weird orientalism.
I could generously say that there’s a kernel of an interesting idea in Soul Traveler, which is why I watched it in the first place: a haunted man burdened with a terrible curse and feeling alienated from his own body. The movie doesn’t give any of that. At a certain point, however, I’ve ranted about this movie enough that it feels like I’m punching down. Complaining about the lack of quality in Soul Traveler is a bit like calling out your kid’s arts & crafts project from camp for not being Rodin’s Thinker. It’s true but nobody’s getting anything out of it.
I’m not the best writer in the world, sure, but I’ve written a lot of things, many of which were enjoyed by people. I like to think I know what goes into a story, where and why. I’m realizing now that that’s an ability that I’ve honed over many years of practice, and not everyone on Earth has it. Watching something as terrible as this can, it seems, sharpen your abilities, by helping you recognize what’s missing and what to do about it. However, I would exercise extreme caution in looking for lessons in this one. You should do literally anything else instead.