Would You Like To Try Again?

Melvin Hill is dead. An electrician by day, an arcade owner by night, he leaves behind a trove of machines in a remote arcade in the middle of rural Georgia. His wife and executor, Bethany, carries out his final wishes and leaves the entire arcade, machines and all, to Melvin’s estranged thirty-something daughter, Victoria Hill. The only catch: she has to complete a series of tasks in the arcade over the course of 24 hours before it is completely hers.

Vicky wants absolutely nothing to do with her father, for reasons she keeps close to the vest. She reluctantly accepts the job of one-day warden, knowing full well she’ll sell his entire legacy to the highest bidder to clear her debts and run away as soon as the ink dries.

But over the course of one night, Vicky stumbles upon something she never expected. In the back sits an old, nameless arcade machine that simulates a player’s old regrets as levels to beat. Equipped with hindsight, Victoria plays her past regrets in hopes of winning closure and catharsis. Yet what she discovers is a journey deeper into her family’s past than she ever expected.

A wish-fulfillment odyssey that soars to euphoric highs and tragic depths, Would You Like To Try Again? is a magical realism film that examines, prods and peels back our deepest regrets as puzzles to solve for troubled hearts. It should inspire endless conversations about what we’d change in our past if we could just put one token in the machine and get another chance to try again.

My two loves in life are movies and video games. They’re both visually driven mediums. They both take over your senses to immerse you in worlds you’ve never seen before. They both engross you in stories with characters you fall in love with. They’re both empathy machines that help you understand what it means to be human. Also, they’re fun as hell. There’s something in the center of this Venn diagram I’ve always wanted to explore in a movie: why do I feel so deeply when watching a movie or playing a video game? Really transcendent games and movies make me think about my own life. What I’m proud of, and what I’ve done wrong. The regrets I still wrestle with to this day, that stick to me like a level in a game I can hopefully beat, if I can just do this one thing differently or say the one thing I never said. The biggest regrets go back as far as I can remember, to when my family wasn’t happy. When they fought. When they screamed. When they threw things. When they said things they couldn’t take back, and can’t take back now, no matter how hard they try.

Don’t we wish we could all just go back, do things a little differently, and gain closure from that moment? Or better yet, go back knowing what we know now, and try to understand someone a little more, so we can forgive them and ultimately forgive ourselves?