Synchronic (MA, 102 minutes) 4 stars.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The bartender says: "We don't serve time travellers in here".
A time traveller walks into a bar.
Just as a I love a good dad joke, I also love a good time travel movie and what's not to love about Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's inventive and atmospheric SciFi film Synchronic.
The directing pair throw two stars of usually bigger budget flicks together in a small indie film that explores the concept of time travel as the unintended consequence of recreational drug use. That doesn't sound promising, but bear with me.
Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) are paramedics working the City of New Orleans. Long nights in the back of their ambulance or killing time between calls has made the pair a tight twosome who know everything about each other and have each other's backs.
But when Steve is diagnosed with a brain tumour, he doesn't tell his friend straight away.
While their city is throwing a higher than usual number of truly unusual deaths and near fatalities for them to work, Steve begins to notice anachronistic items at the scenes of death including one case where a homeless man is impaled by an antique sword.
Also present at a number of these cases are the discarded packaging for a designer drug called Synchronic.
The mysterious deaths come close to home for the pair when Dennis's teenage daughter Brianna (Ally Ionnides) is reported missing from one crime scene that includes a death and an overdose, the ground strewn with Synchronic wrappers.
While Dennis and his estranged wife Tara (Katie Aselton) mount the missing persons case for their daughter, Steve decides to investigate the designer drug which leads him to the drug's inventor (Ramiz Monsef).
It turns out Steve's brain tumour makes his body receptive to one of the drug's unexpected side effects, time travel, and he begins to wonder whether Brianna has also disappeared into time.
Synchronic is reminiscent of the Bradley Cooper film Limitless, where a pill gives its consumer uncharted brain power for a period, and here the machine of the gods is a pill that throws its consumer back through the ages.
Interesting to watch play out is the idea that the time travel happens in the same geological location, with Mackie getting displaced to the Ice Age, to the Civil War, the slave era early colonial versions of the couch in his apartment. The time displacement is temporary, but Steve makes multiple experiments to see what triggers his return home, and whether he can bring anything back with him.
There is humour in the screenplay, but also serious socio-historical ideas about the way a young black man is seen across different eras.
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead make an awesome filmmaking duo. They are long-time collaborators with more memorable of the work including the 2017 film The Endless that they also acted in, and a segment of the low-budget horror V/H/S Viral.
Justin Benson pens a screenplay that inventively allows for the film's low budget, with the kind of long riffing conversations anyone who has worked night shift will be familiar with, but allow for exposition and for musings on the mechanics and physics behind the action.
Benson explains time travel like the record of a needle skipping grooves, and the pair work with Michael Felker on the editing desk to give the audience that sensation of a jumped track.
In addition to both taking the director's chair, Aaron Moorhead play cinematographer and he shoots New Orleans as a dark noir landscape, and the team assembled around them convincingly create different eras through atmosphere rather than elaborate sets or CGI.
Mackie and Dornan make a great onscreen pairing, believable friends. It is nice to see Dornan back in the indie domain he used to work before he was painted Fifty Shades of Grey.
But this is very much Mackie's film, a meaty and interesting character and a subtle portrayal. He's about to build a new legion of fans when The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuts on Disney+ so go see this now and you can tell your friends you liked him when he was only mostly famous.