In And every day the groundhog greets youAn inexplicable force – perhaps celestial, certainly moral – keeps misanthropic weatherman Bill Murray trapped in a single, repeating day until he sheds his attitude and becomes a better person. Palm SpringsThe work-shy wedding guests Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti find themselves in a time loop vortex in a cave, a quirk of astrophysics. In Edge of TomorrowTom Cruise and Emily Blunt fight against an alien invasion on the same day again and again after being infected with the time loop by the aliens’ blood. In Source codeIn “The 40 Fingers,” Jake Gyllenhaal is an involuntary lab rat who is forced by his military superiors to run an eight-minute simulation until he gets the right result.
Omni-Loop is a time loop movie with one important difference. It’s not the length of time, although Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) has the relatively luxurious span of a week to live over and over again. It’s a matter of choice. In most time loop movies, the characters are somehow trapped in the loop against their will, searching for a way out of an existential nightmare. In Omni-LoopEach time, Zoya decides to take a pill and start the week over.
Why? Because she dies from a black hole in her chest. This is one of several wildly fantastic details in the otherwise normal world of Omni-Loop which are treated as unremarkable by the characters; it’s a film that teeters in a strange space between science fiction, grounded drama and magical realism. Another such detail is a nanoscopic man who, like Ant-Man, lives in a subatomic realm in a Plexiglas box and communicates with the outside world via text message. And no one seems to question the provenance of the bottle of time-loop pills that Zoya found as a girl, with her name printed on the label. She indirectly implies that she has been taking the pills, which never seem to run out, all her life.
Is that why she dies from a black hole in her chest? And where did those pills come from anyway? It’s not a spoiler if I say that Omni-Loop does not address these questions, because anyone looking for answers to these kinds of questions is watching the wrong film. Omni-Loop Screenwriter and director Bernardo Britto has no problem with his film being an obvious metaphor, and dispenses with the need to explain the plot mechanics or the scientific part.
What he has made is a quiet, moving little film about loss, acceptance and self-worth. Zoya is a theoretical physicist, like her husband Donald (Carlos Jacott), but after a promising start at Princeton, her career never really took off, and she has devoted at least as much of her life to her family – she has a grown daughter, Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) – as to her research. Now, at the end of her life, consumed by regret, she keeps choosing to relive her last seven days, even as she becomes frustrated and bored by her family’s sweet attempts to provide something special.
A spark ignites when she meets Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a lab assistant who carries a textbook of Zoya’s. Zoya lets Paula in on the secret of her existence in the time loop and begins avoiding her family, escaping the hospital and reintroducing herself to Paula so they can move forward with their old research. The pair attempt to reverse engineer the pills so she can travel back further and do something about the literal hole in her heart.
Image: Magnolia Pictures
The metaphor is pretty obvious, but if the film works, it’s because of Parker and Edebiri. Two comedians with a lot of range and a quiet nervousness, they fit well together and have a great rapport; Edebiri is a warm, understated scene partner for Parker, who would otherwise have to bear the burden of an entire film about a woman’s inner life. It’s just a shame that Edebiri’s role as a character in her own right never quite makes sense. Her motivations are either obscure or a little too emotional, and the development of her relationship with Zoya doesn’t ring believable considering she’s constantly meeting her for the first time.
The true joy of Omni-Loop to see Parker in such a significant role. You probably remember her as the suburban mother who weedalways absentmindedly sipping a huge iced coffee, her wide eyes flashing a quicksilver mix of confusion, sarcastic detachment and girlish delight. She has a lively screen presence and is a great actress, and she turns what would otherwise be a rather trite ending to Zoya’s story into something honest and touching.
Omni-Loop takes its name from a branch of the Metromover transit system in Miami—an elevated, automated monorail system from the 1980s that looks somewhat retro-futuristic today. Britto shoots scenes with the characters on these trains to emphasize the film’s subtle, faded sci-fi aesthetic. But the futurism of the title doesn’t really fit the film; it’s not a dystopian exploration of time and identity like Source codeNor is it interested in exploiting all the dramatic and comic variations (not to mention the philosophical and ethical implications) of being stuck in time, as And every day the groundhog greets you does. His time loop is neither an existential trap nor a satirical device.
Omni-Loop uses repetition in a more intimate and psychological way; it’s a time-loop film for the therapeutic age. Britto’s ambitions are smaller and the film is sometimes vague. But in the end, thanks to Parker, it manages to bring to light an emotional truth about a person who is facing perhaps the hardest thing one can face: the end and the resulting reckoning with everything that came before.
Omni-Loop is now in theaters.
