I’ll Follow You Down

In 2000, Gabe, a professor from Toronto, Rufus Sewell goes to Princeton, New Jersey, for a conference but does not return. He is eventually presumed dead, devastating his wife Marika Whyte, Gillian Anderson, and his young son Erol. Twelve years later, Erol, Haley Joel Osment, talks with his grandfather Sal, Victor Garber, who suggests that Gabe’s disappearance might have been the result of a scientific experiment involving time travel. Erol is a mathematical genius and sets out to recreate the time travel machine his father had built to go back in time to 1946. As he works with Sal on this machine and the math and physics of it, Erol’s girlfriend, Grace, Susanna Fournier becomes pregnant and makes him doubt the necessity of this endeavor. But tragedy hits hard: when Grace has a miscarriage and Marika commits suicide (as a result of her grief and confusion over her husband’s unexplained failure to return), Erol realizes that the current timeline is the direct result of Gabe’s absence: none of this would have happened if Gabe had come home, so this timeline is a dead-end and has to be corrected. With renewed vigor, Erol finishes the time machine. He uses it to go back to 1946 and finds Gabe, who is looking for Albert Einstein (because he had finished some work that Einstein had started). Erol reveals his identity to his father and explains the chain of events that had led him to come find him. He tells Gabe to go back home and give his family the life they deserve, and to remember that he, Erol, is what he is because of his father’s mistake. Knowing Gabe’s mind, Erol realizes this will not be enough to persuade him to return home. So he shoots himself, dying instantly. As he had intended, this burns the message into Gabe’s mind that he has to go back and prevent all of this from happening, which he does.

Last Updated: October 03, 2025 at 10:35