A psych-101 Reddit thread drives the plot of David Guy Levy’s The Mandela Effect, referring to the phenomenon of “remembering” something that has never been true, whether it’s Curious George having a tail or the Monopoly man wearing a monocle. However insignificant these false pop-culture memories are in real life, they’re bestowed with literal life-or-death stakes in this screen telling.

Video game designer Brendan (Charlie Hofheimer, an alum of Levy’s Would You Rather) learns of the theory from his brother-in-law (Robin Lord Taylor, John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum). Perhaps because Brendan is grieving the drowning death of his daughter (Madeleine McGraw, Ant-Man and the Wasp), he latches onto the theory with an unhealthy fervor. Before long, he’s stalking a college professor (Outland’s Clarke Peters, obviously a Morgan Freeman stand-in) who believes Brendan is witnessing the result of alternate realities colliding, and whose quantum computer can allow them to alter the world’s “code” so they can bring the girl back to life. Or something like that.

Providing no shortage of Big Ideas, Levy and his Would You Rather collaborator Steffen Schlachtenhaufen have the makings of a Matrix-style head-tripper, but the pertinent information to transition into that all-important third act is delivered with such immediacy (as opposed to urgency) that the climax feels rushed — which truly may be the case, as the film clocks in at a brief 80 minutes, credits included. Had Brendan and the professor looked before they leapt, so to speak, The Mandela Effect might have resonated with its intended power. Lost in that sprint is a late subplot about the mental state of Brendan’s wife (Aleksa Palladino, The Irishman), although she does pop back up just long enough to contract what looks to be a medical condition known in the field as Jenga Face.

The fun of the film is all upfront, if viewers know to look for hidden-in-plain-sight examples of the Mandela effect before the narration alerts you to them; it’s like playing Life magazine’s Picture Puzzle feature, in which readers are challenged to spot the differences between two photos. With paranoia brewing stronger as the story progresses, one wonders what a director with demonstrated skill in this arena before — say, Pi’s Darren Aronofsky or Primer’s Shane Carruth — could do with it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

One of the earliest found-footage movies, if not the earliest, Dean Alioto’s no-budget The McPherson Tape purports to document one family’s encounter with extraterrestrials on an evening in the fall of 1983. Despite the title, this clan’s surname isn’t McPherson, but Van Heese. The night that changes their life happens to coincide with their celebration of a girl’s fifth birthday, thereby accounting for the constant use of the video camera.

The Tape’s strongest suit is that the cast members interact like a real family would at a paper-plate supper — gentle ribbing, overlapping conversations and all. Other than the two brothers — our ostensible leads — we witness more normal human behavior than we do acting. But — and this is rhetorical — how exciting is watching normal human behavior?

After that interminable dinner, unusual lights through the windows prompt the brothers to wander through the woods to see what’s what. From a distance, they spot a couple of alien life forms stepping off a landed spacecraft, or, in the words of one of the Van Heese boys, “a Martian or shit or somethin’!” Rightly fearing for their lives, they hightail it back to the house … until they decide to go back outside again. Among a power failure and the siblings hauling a dead alien inside (without affording us a glimpse), the family plays Go Fish and the matriarch voices her desire to watch Johnny Carson.

And so it goes (and goes and goes and …) until the literal last shot, when something interesting finally happens, giving us our first good look at the space invaders. It’s a letdown, however, because it’s nothing you can’t see answering the door every Oct. 31. An anal probe would elicit more emotion. In 1998, for Dick Clark Productions and the late, not-so-great UPN network, Alioto remade The McPherson Tape as Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County with less believability, but more tension and action, not to mention actual characters named McPherson. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.