Stream It Or Skip It?
Omni Loop (now streaming on Hulu) is one of the more understated brainbenders in recent memory. Writer/director Bernardo Britto concocted a high-concept time-travel story and executed it with a low budget, casting Mary-Louise Parker as a dying woman trapped in a Groundhog Day-style time loop – with variations on that classic film’s conceit, of course. And it has us wondering if Britto can wring something fresh and inspiring from that somewhat staid idea.
OMNI LOOP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We begin with a rather Kaufmanesque development (Charlie, not Andy): “She has a black hole growing inside of her body,” the doctor says. This is a thing that happens in this reality. The doc even has a pamphlet for the family to peruse if they want. Zoya (Mary-Louise Parker) is the afflicted. Donald (Carlos Jacott) is her husband and Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) is their adult daughter. There’s no cure and she has maybe a week to live and as the doctor says this a group of hospital employees down the hall erupts into cheers while watching a big game. The things we distract ourselves with to stave off the unpleasant, intrusive concept of mortality, right?
Zoya awakens to the comforting warmth of Jayne calmly and quietly saying, “Hi Mom.” Zoya seems rather bland about… all this. Accepting of her fate? Possibly. Upset? Nope. And there’s a good reason for that, if not an entirely explicable one. Back when she was 12, she found a prescription bottle of pills in a field. Her name was on it. Curious. She took one (which doesn’t seem wise, but never mind) and jumped back in time one week. EXTRA curious. She still has some of the pills, because the apparent Existential Quandary Metaphysical Pharmacy magically refills the bottle. This is quite a convenient prescription to have when you only have one week to live, right? And so she’s been here many times now, awakening to the comforting warmth of Jayne calmly and quietly saying, “Hi Mom.”
So Zoya knows exactly how her “last week on Earth” goes: A meeting with her publisher (she writes physics textbooks), her signature on her will, a visit to her apparently dementia-stricken mother in assisted living, a surprise early birthday party during which she gets a nosebleed, the sign that It’s Time, so she pops one of the pills and awakens to the comforting warmth of Jayne calmly and quietly saying, “Hi Mom.” After she goes through this a couple-few times and we start to wonder what if she chooses to do something different, she chooses to do something different, which results in her meeting Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a student who’s studying the passage of time. Rather serendipitous, this meeting. Imagine if Zoya instead had met an Austen scholar or an IT cog. How useless that might be!
Paula listens to Zoya’s extraordinary experiences and agrees to help her crack the mystery of time travel, which involves analyzing the pills and resurrecting Zoya’s studies from 30 years ago. Her motive? Go back and change things to make her life better, something we all might like to do, assuming we wouldn’t render the time-space continuum a chaotic cosmic cataclysm, or something worse, like Washington, D.C. traffic. And so Zoya’s repetitive routine changes to meeting and re-meeting Paula over and over again, telling the story and convincing her to help, etc. This requires Zoya to ditch her worried family as she throws herself into research, creating an emotional conundrum that has her wondering if this is a life worth living. Tough question. And no easy answers, either.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Source Code, Primer, Edge of Tomorrow and Palm Springs are among many films that copped the Groundhog Day time-loop concept – although Natasha Lyonne Netflix series Russian Doll does it better than any of the copycats. Omni Loop also has a droll sense of weird-reality along the lines of Downsizing and Charlie Kaufman strangenesses like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich.
Performance Worth Watching: Edebiri is unassumingly funny here in a way that reminds us that the funniest people simply are funny without trying to be funny. She and the assured-as-ever Parker (who we prayed for after seeing her in Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp) generate enough interpersonal chemistry to keep the movie afloat dramatically.
Memorable Dialogue: Paula drops a tough question on Zoya: “Have you ever thought what it’s like when you disappear?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Do we all have black holes inside us that’ll never be filled? I think so – it feels like a universal human compulsion to want more than we have, whether it’s one more bite of cheesecake, that rare and elusive vintage Star Wars action figure or more love. Omni Loop implies that too much yearning for the future distracts us from the present, and that yearning could eat you alive. It also implies that we could all use another hug, a little compassion, someone to listen to us and/or one more moment with the people who matter most to us. And I’d take that a step further and say the movie illustrates how moments are temporary by definition, and probably should stay that way. If something exists for too long, it becomes furniture and you take it for granted. And then, all things being temporary, we miss it when it’s gone. Such is the loop we often find ourselves in.
Britto’s approach to the material is endearingly askew, aiming to be a thoughtful emotional philosophical theoretical drama with the occasional dollop of droll comedy. The filmmaker sometimes tries a little too hard to put an arrow in the profundity bullseye, but his core sentiment rings true in the hands of Parker, Edebiri and Utt, who deliver unassumingly complex performances. Parker leans away from any and all overblown displays of emotion, of the kind we might expect from an actor playing a dying woman, and compellingly explores a character who’s working her way towards discovering what truly matters the most to her in this life. Her tonality changes subtly as Zoya’s affection grows for Paula, a friend who can’t fully reciprocate due to the “rules” of the time-loop concept, and the dynamic becomes a gentle treatise on the idea of giving love without concerning yourself about getting some in return.
Zoya’s reason for tackling the metaphysics of her predicament is to go back “to a time before I settled.” She dreamt of being a groundbreaking scientist, but gave up to be a writer of physics texts, and she expresses her regret to her daughter, who yearns to be a professional pianist but is willing to be a piano teacher because it’s a more realistic goal. Such bits assert Omni Loop as a story about relationships and emotions more than the dizzying components of time travel, the “rules” for which Britto leaves fuzzy (an apologist would say the mystery is more compelling than knowing how the sausage is made; a realist would say movies that get bogged down in sci-fi mechanics tend to get tedious). I felt a little frustrated that the complexity of the movie’s concept resulted in a simplistic sentiment about valuing your time with your loved ones, until Parker perfectly executes the film’s dramatic climax. Sometimes it’s more about wringing the truth out of a cliche than avoiding the cliche.
Our Call: Omni Loop is good enough to convince us that it’s not quite time to retire this premise. But it feels like it’s getting close. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
