Youll see a lot of mirrors in The Quantum Suicide of Sophie Miller. Cyclical events and repetitive history are a prominent element of Matts screenplay, and mirrors provide a convenient signifier of their importance to the narrative. But their thematic significance goes much further than just that. In a sense, the true heart of the story is Sophies act of reflection on her own past; burdened by loss and guilt, she is driven to offer herself in an impossible scientific experiment as much by a quest for penance, appropriately a Catholic religious sacrament, as by scientific inquiry.

But even more than that, lurking behind every event in the story, pervading the entire thematic landscape of Sophies journey, is the improbable Many Worlds Hypothesis; that for every moment that Sophie looks into a mirror, there may be an alternate 'mirrored' reality somewhere out there, staring back at her, where the undeviatingly manifest quantum coin toss landed tails instead of heads. And that is the ultimate self-reflective experience; to not only contemplate what might have been, but to truly sit in apprehension of the possibility that there is in fact an alternate, parallel reality where it actually came to pass. It is both the greatest mechanism of dream fulfillment--that in an alternate reality your regrets, losses and failures evaporate--and the greatest tragedy--that you cannot and will not ever consciously experience that reality--one could possibly ever imagine.

Regardless whether the relative state hypothesis is valid in experiential terms or it merely provides that there are infinite realities whose only difference is whether electrons spin up or down, there is still an undeniable and indomitable philosophical truth to be gleaned from its hypothetical musings-that all our lives are determined by a series of coin tosses, by events completely out of our own power to influence. Had they turned out differently, they would have exercised a profound influence on the course of our lives, and we may well be different people today for it. And while we may never exist alone in a perpetual state of permanent immortal consciousness (although, the notion does have its appeal), we must still concede the degree to which our lives, and the universe at large, are truly guided by events that are completely random.

And this is what Sophies burden, her quest for understanding and enlightenment, is truly all about-to hoist up the immobile curtain and expose the hidden workings behind it, if only to provide meaning to her own conscious life experience. It is where science, spirituality, and philosophy all meet, for as astronomer Carl Sagan would have put it, they are all 'a quest for the Truth.' A truth that is, perhaps, unknowable. For we are not telepathic, we are not the Borg; we are only ever aware of our own consciousness. We can never know whether Schrodingers cat is consciously self-aware, or to couch it in religious terms, whether Schrodingers cat actually has a soul. Perhaps relative state got it right, that there is no consciousness but our own, and that everything else we experience in this universe is but a shadow looking back at us, like our reflection in a mirror.

But for our purposes here, the greatest irony of all is that The Quantum Suicide of Sophie Miller is itself a kind of mirror, a kind of reflection, because it is a movie, and the audience its final reflector. For each one of us will experience the story in our own way and identify in our own unique capacities with different parts of its dramatic tapestry, whether that is love lost, a struggle for penance, a thirst for forgiveness, a crusade for scientific discovery, a conflict of faith, or in my case, a fruitless endeavor to actually understand all the math. And that is its final beauty; that the experience of the film is, as Alice would put it, 'only what we make of it.' And I think I can speak for Matt, Darrell, Alexia, Kyle, Rebecca, and the rest of our phenomenally talented cast and crew when I say its an experience I cant wait to share with you.

~K.G. Bender
Director, Executive Producer
October 2012