There’s something very special about a small café. If the guest sits down in a special place and is served hot coffee, they can travel back in time, but they cannot change the past. But they can say goodbye to those who stood them close. The main thing is that the coffee can not get cold, because then things will go wrong for the person who has traveled back to the past.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a warm and kind movie, but I felt the whole thing was a bit artificial. The movie feels a little cheap, and most of the characters you meet are uninteresting. The way their stories are told doesn’t feel real, it feels artificial and I didn’t feel that they earned my sympathy.
The most interesting thing that is going on in this cafe is the mysterious guest who is a ghost. As a viewer, you come up with different theories about who this woman is, which keeps the interest up. You realize that she is an important piece in this puzzle. She is in a way the heart of the movie because without her the movie would quickly get boring.
Besides the ghost, the focus is on the protagonist and the man that she has fallen for. I don’t think this was particularly well-told, for her big love is a rather boring and uninteresting character. It’s more interesting to find out more about her past, what happened there and why she is so enclosed and sad.
If you don’t expect too much of Before the Coffee Gets Cold as a time travel movie, it’s maybe worth watching if you like this type of movies. But don’t expect a big production, the movie feels cheap and most of the characters are poorly written. But you understand why the protagonist is so sad, and you hope that things will work out for her.