God made you to be the person you are right now.  Logically, we cannot be anyone else no matter how much we might wish for it.  I know I am guilty of wanting to be Another Version of You (2018), or me, I should say.  An argument can be made that one of the reason humans began conceiving of the concept of parallel universes is because we regret the choices that brought us to our current state.  We look back on previous decisions and believe that if we had done this instead of that, things would be different.  That may be true, but there is nothing we can do about it now.  It is an old cliché, but God’s gift to us is the current moment, which is why it is called the present.  It is all we have, and it is all we need.  These themes, including the science fiction sounding stuff, are found in today’s film, which is mostly satisfying up until the end.

Diggsy Ellston (Kristopher Wente) thinks his life is coming to an end when Another Version of You begins.  As Suzette Larking (Sara Antonio) exits the church with her groom, Diggsy is across the street drinking from a flask.  He is not taking part in the festivities because Suzette has not married him.  As the limousine pulls away that will take the newlyweds to their reception, Daphne Ellston (Brittany Belland) crosses the street to comfort him.  As his sister and best friend, she knows that he has loved Suzette since he was nine-years-old, but had apparently never plucked up the courage to make his feelings known.  Daphne’s advice to Diggsy is to shake off his gloom, though, because she expects him to come to the reception.  Instead, he walks the streets alone, composing a few different phone messages to Suzette before ending up at a bar.  While staring into nothing over a drink, he is approached by a man named Mortimer (Eddie George).  Unprompted, Mortimer launches into a story about being alone one evening, having a similar countenance as Diggsy, and having another person come up to him.  In that moment, Mortimer was handed a key and a set of instructions, and these two items are passed to Diggsy with Mortimer adding that he looks like he could use them.  Unfolding the partially torn piece of paper, the heading at the top of the list gives procedures for using the key to travel to a different dimension. Since this sounds as crazy as it seems, Diggsy dismisses the notion, but holds on to the items nonetheless.  A couple of times he is about to give the key a turn in a lock, but something prevents him in each moment.  Thankfully, he manages to make it home, and awakens in the morning on his couch with a hand on a bottle.  It is not long thereafter that Daphne angrily shows up at his place wondering where he has been.  At length, he explains the stranger at the bar and shows her the key.  Despite how outlandish it sounds, Diggsy is tempted to give it a try, thinking it could be an opportunity to find the right Suzette for him.  Daphne believes her brother to be bonkers, but she goes along with the scheme for the moment, helping him pack a suitcase and intending to go with him.  They then go to the front door, insert the key, turn the lock, and open.  They are greeted by the hallway of his apartment complex, appearing no different than it normally does.  As a joke, she slams the door on him and he is left outside.  When he tries to get back inside, he is confused to find the entrance locked.  Upon knocking, he is greeted by a complete stranger that tells him to get lost.  If you are wondering what has happened, one of the rules of the universe hopping is that once a portal is shut behind him, he cannot return.  There is some existential terror in the realization that the key actually works, but he is soon enjoying the ability to hop through space.  He enters each universe seemingly in a different place, sometimes bumping into alternate versions of himself.  A few times, he is envious of that alternate version, getting a glimpse into a life of his that could have been.  Occasionally this is with Suzette, or someone else, and often Daphne is a part of these scenarios.  Speaking of Daphne, one of the dimensions he enters is one in which he had died.  Given their closeness, she is overjoyed to see him again, though he has to explain the situation with the key.  Eventually, he says he has to leave, and she tries to stop him.  In the struggle, he goes through the door with her, and it accidentally closes behind them, cutting her off from her reality.  We have to witness her coming to terms with her new life of dimension hopping.  It does not go on long for her, though, as they finally meet a Suzette that is single and eager to talk to them.  Ironically, the interactions between Daphne and Suzette become romantic, and when Diggsy comes out of his drunken stupor, they have decided to remain together in this universe.  He is hurt but accepts it and moves on, happy for his sister.  After a few more jumps, he comes across a door with a package with Suzette’s name on it.  Going inside, he finds her dying of cancer.  In this moment, he finally works up the courage to say what he could not before, but she tells him that she is not what he should be searching.  Leaving, he once more encounters Gwyneth (C.J. Perry).  I say once more because he had a brief romantic encounter with another version of her, pun intended.  Taking the last Suzette’s advice, he settles in with her and starts to make a life with Gwyneth.  Working in the same coffee shop as Gwyneth, he is surprised one day when Suzette shows up.  In this universe, Diggsy and Suzette had been engaged, but she broke it off.  She explains this coming over to the house he has been sharing with Gwyneth, kissing him as Gwyneth walks in on them.  There is confusion, and during it, Gwyneth uses the key but is the one pushed outside with Suzette unwittingly shutting the door.  Shocked, Diggsy does the same.  This time, he decides to stop dimension traveling, getting a job and a new set of friends, and throwing the key into a river.  The last scene has him exiting a book store and spotting another Gwyneth.

I have to confess that my hope at the end of Another Version of You was that Diggsy would see Suzette, suggesting that perhaps they would be together.  I am a hopeless romantic, and the notion that he had set out on this extra-dimensional journey to find her appealed to me.  Though I know I should not do so, there are moments when I wish I had the ability to get another chance at something I had done.  If God were to grant me such an opportunity, I would be hard pressed to turn it down.  At the same time, that is not the lesson Diggsy learns from his trials.  In his Homer-esque travels, he sets out with one goal in mind, and realizes that there is more to life than what we think we want.  Of course, it is not an immediate realization, and one can stretch this thinking to the Spiritual life.  What Diggsy and the rest of us share at our core is a longing for something, a big something that can be as defined as our heart and imagination allow us.  That longing often leads to searching, and that is what takes hold of our main character.  Unfortunately, his quest has nothing to do with faith, although there is one moment during which we see him inside a church.  For Christians, it is having a relationship with God that we seek.  One can rightly describe Diggsy as having a disordered priority since he is fixated on Suzette, though that same logic could potentially be ascribed to Christians.  The difference, and it should be obvious, is that Suzette is not God, though Diggsy makes a god of her.  Still, my interest is more in comparing the way in which the journeys can mirror one another.  Once Diggsy finds this gift of interdimensional travel, like someone realizing God is real for the first time, he delights in the wonder of it all.  Yet, as that wears off, he has to come to understand that there is so much more to what he is doing.  There are lives that are affected by his actions, just as our own are as we come to know God in a deeper fashion.  God wants to be intimate with us first and foremost, and everything else in our lives will flow from that point.  Diggsy does not have the same epiphany, but he stops chasing after the impossible and sees the universe in which he stops as good in its own right, whether it has a Suzette.  In other words, he learns to be with himself, just as God wants.

To be clear, learning to be comfortable with yourself as Diggsy comes to do in Another Version of You is not the same as allowing God to be comfortable with you.  At the same time, it could be as close as our secular world will allow for holiness.  Pursuing the things of the world is something the Church teaches against, and Suzette is part of many worlds that Diggsy needlessly chases.  As such, while I wish it had a different ending, this one gets my recommendation.