Critic Reviews

Elgort does great work juggling what is essentially a dual performance, while Oliver, making his feature directorial debut, here, keeps things clipping along at a taut, engaging pace. Small in scope, yet successful in just about every aspect of its unspooling, Jonathan stands tall.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like Jonathan fully commits to its own premise.

The movie is not interested in wrapping things up via a “smash the mirror” epiphany. It’s to Oliver’s credit that he’s taken a more tough-minded than easily cathartic approach. And Ansel Elgort’s wonderful performance does appropriate honor to the ambiguity the movie is trucking in.

The debut feature succeeds thanks to a credibly bifurcated performance by star Ansel Elgort.

Taken on its own confidently crafted terms, Jonathan is an intelligent, absorbing tale that provides an impressive showcase for “Baby Driver” star Ansel Elgort.

For forty minutes we become intimately aware of Oliver’s sci-fi conceit through heightened emotions, visual puzzles, and potential betrayals. It’s the perfect set-up for a thriller built on exclusion and yet it becomes much more.

The dichotomy represented by Jonathan and John is too clean for the film's exploration of a divided psyche to ever feel particularly complex.

Jonathan is good enough for us to want it to be better.

Jonathan plays like an intellectual puzzle that isn’t challenging enough, an acting exercise that has everything but emotional connection and a tour de force robbed of its force by just lying there, inert when it should be picking up steam, cold when the characters and scenario should be heating up.

The movie, itself somewhat torn in sensibility, permits itself an easy out.