In Groundhog DayAn inexplicable force—perhaps celestial, certainly moral—traps misanthropic weatherman Bill Murray into a single, repeated day until he sheds his attitude and becomes a better person. Palm SpringsWedding guests Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti fall into a time loop vortex, an astrophysics phenomenon, in a cave. On the edge of tomorrowTom Cruise and Emily Blunt fight off an alien invasion on the same day over and over again after being infected with the time loop by the aliens' blood. Source codeJake Gyllenhaal is a reluctant lab rat, forced by his military superiors to run an eight-minute simulation repeatedly until he gets the right result.
Omnidirectional loop is a time-loop movie with one important difference. It's not the length of time involved, though 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 have somehow been trapped in the loop against their will and are searching for a way out of an existential nightmare. Omnidirectional loopZoya chooses to take a pill and restart the week, every time.
Why? Because he's dying from a black hole in his chest. This is one of the many incredibly fantastic details of the otherwise normal world of Omnidirectional loop which the characters treat as if they were nothing special; it’s a film that inhabits a strange space between science fiction, realistic drama and magical realism. Another similar detail is a nanoscopic man who lives, like Ant-Man, in a subatomic realm inside a perspex box and communicates with the outside world by text message. And no one seems to question the provenance of the bottle of time-loop pills, which Zoya remembers finding as a child, with her name printed on the label. She indirectly suggests that she has been using the pills, which never seem to run out, for her entire life.
Is that why he's dying from a black hole in his chest? And where did those pills come from? It's not a spoiler to say. Omnidirectional loop It doesn't address these questions, because if you come to it looking for those kinds of answers, you're watching the wrong movie. Omnidirectional loop Writer-director Bernardo Britto is quite comfortable with his film being an open metaphor, dismissing any need to explain the mechanics of the plot or the scientific aspects.
What she has made is a quiet, moving 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 quite took off, and she has devoted at least as much of her life to her family (she has an adult daughter, Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt)) as to her research. Now, consumed by end-of-life regret, she keeps choosing to relive her last seven days, even as she is frustrated and bored by her family’s sweet attempts to make them special.
A spark is lit when she bumps into Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a lab assistant who carries Zoya’s textbook. Zoya tells Paula the secret of her existence in the time loop and begins avoiding her family, running away from the hospital, and reintroducing herself to Paula so they can advance her old research. The pair are trying to reverse engineer the pills, so she can travel further back and do something about the literal hole in her heart.
Image: Magnolia Pictures
The metaphor is obvious enough, but if the film works it’s because of Parker and Edebiri. Two comic actors with plenty of range and a nervous edge, they complement each other well and have a great rapport; Edebiri is a warm, understated scene partner for Parker, who would otherwise be stranded, bearing the weight of an entire film about a woman’s inner life. It’s a shame that Edebiri’s role never makes sense as a character in her own right. Her motivations are either obscure or a little too emotionally convenient, and the evolution of her relationship with Zoya doesn’t ring true considering she’s constantly meeting her for the first time.
The true joy of Omnidirectional loop It's seeing Parker take on such a big role. You probably remember her as the suburban mom turned marijuana dealer in WeedsAlways absentmindedly sipping a giant iced coffee, her saucer eyes flash a mercurial mix of bemusement, sardonic distance and childlike glee. She has a vivid screen presence and is a great actress, and turns what might otherwise be a fairly simple ending to Zoya's story into something honest and moving.
Omnidirectional loop The film takes its name from a branch of the Metromover transit system in Miami, an elevated, automated monorail system from the 1980s that now looks a bit retro-futuristic. Britto films scenes of the characters on these trains to accentuate the film's subtle, faded sci-fi aesthetic. But the futurism of the title doesn't really suit the film; it's not a dystopian exploration of time and identity like Source code. Nor is he interested in exploiting all the dramatic and comic variations (not to mention the philosophical and ethical implications) of being trapped in time as Groundhog Day It does. Its time loop is neither an existential trap nor a satirical device.
Omnidirectional loop It uses repetition in a more intimate, psychological way; it's a time-loop movie for the therapeutic age. Britto's ambitions are lesser and the film is vague at times. But in the end, thanks to Parker, it manages to get at an emotional truth about a person who is stuck facing perhaps the hardest thing a person can face: the end and the resulting reckoning with everything that came before.
Omnidirectional loop It's already in theaters.