It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here with Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps.

Genevieve Kosky is absent from this pairing in this timeline, but in many other timelines, she did join us for this episode.

So if you want to hear what she thought about this pairing, just loop backaways in your own personal time and make different choices

until a different version of this podcast appears. For our latest pairing, we're looking at

two films that navigate branching timelines and roads taken and not taken in very different ways,

and with very different messages about fate, self-determination, and the

invisible forces that might shape our lives as much as the choices that we clearly see in

front of us. Keith, you want to lay out the two branches in front of us?

This week, we're starting with Christoph Kislauski's Blind Chance, a 1987 precursor to our

recent next picture show pick, Run the Low Run. Like Tom Tickfer's movie, Kislauski's

structures blind chance around a life that plays out in three different ways, with a young Polish man

radically changing his politics and his life depending on the different ways that specific event unfolds.

The film asks some big questions about how much chance determines what we care about,

who we love, and what

we will come. But it also asks them by playing out the 1980s version of a multiverse story.

Next week we'll take out Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shiner. It's everything everywhere all at once,

a much more 2020s version of the multiverse story, starring Michelle Yo as a Harriet laundromat

owner who gets a glimpse

...