THE STORY – A quantum physicist finds herself stuck in a time loop with a black hole growing in her chest and only a week to live. When she meets a gifted student they team up to save her life and unlock the mysteries of time travel.
THE CAST – Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edebiri, Carlos Jacott, Chris Witaske, Hannah Pearl Utt & Harris Yulin
THE TEAM – Bernardo Britto (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 107 Minutes
Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) is dying. She has a black hole growing in her chest that will kill her before the week is out. She’s not too pressed about it, though. Once she feels herself starting to succumb, she takes a black pill from a bottle she found when she was a child and immediately finds herself back in time, at the moment she got the diagnosis of a week to live. She more or less does the same things every time she lives that week until one time she breaks down. Then, with the slightest deviation from her usual routine, she runs into Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a student studying quantum physics (specifically time) at the local university. A renowned physicist herself, Zoya’s outlook quickly changes. With another person to help her and access to a lab that contains a nanoscopic man who can’t stop shrinking, maybe she can figure out how the pills work so that she can go back far enough in time to do all the things she never got to do.
Bernardo Britto’s “Omni Loop” opens with a burst of energy, having fun with the tropes of time loop tales and employing some extremely entertaining editing to move us quickly through the opening chapter of Zoya’s story. The sequence where she runs through different ways of proving to Paula that she’s living in a time loop in order to convince her to help set up a comic rhythm and buddy dynamic between the two women feels like the start of a comedy in the vein of “Groundhog Day” or “Palm Springs,” but without the romantic element. After that invigorating opening, though, Britto slows the pace to turn the film into a more melancholic examination of accepting the sum of your life in the face of death. The about-face is handled gradually enough that it doesn’t cause whiplash, but it does feel like the film slowly deflates as it goes on, even as it incorporates some nifty sci-fi concepts like the nanoscopic man.
This is hard sci-fi, with an emphasis on scientific theory that gets very serious in the film’s second half as Zoya laments the long, arduous work of the scientific process. She became a scientist partly because she loves the feeling of solving something but gets impatient and antsy with all the trial and error leading up to that point. It’s a great metaphor for life – completing a task feels good, but the actual work of doing so can wear you down – that fits perfectly in a time-travel narrative. Britto miscalculates the tone, though, trying to split the difference between the comic beginning and profound ending but coming up with something that mostly feels amiable and somewhat meandering. As the pace of the film slows, so does its momentum, and by the time Zoya finally reaches the point where she accepts her diagnosis and lets the black hole she may have created in her chest by taking these pills overtake her, only Parker’s performance keeps the audience invested.
Thankfully, Parker is nothing short of perfection as Zoya, bringing all facets of her screen persona to the fore to create a vivid characterization. Her sly skill with humor adds a sarcastic bite to the dialogue, and her innate quirkiness adds unique twists to the most cliché moments. However, what shines through most is her intelligence. Watching Parker onscreen is so thrilling because you can always see her thinking, processing information, and deciding what to do with it. That added depth keeps “Omni Loop” intriguing even when the film’s insistent score threatens to become overbearing. Parker also cultivates a compelling dynamic with Edebiri. The two performers share similar sensibilities as performers, and their connection is palpable. Given their skill with comedy, it’s difficult watching them in a film that leans more heavily into emotional drama, but they still have such personality that they give the film an air of uniqueness, completely engaging the audience whenever they share the screen.
The film shines when Britto leans into the dynamic between Paula and Zoya. Parker and Edebiri throw off sparks whenever their characters butt heads, making their discussions of the science of time travel entertaining. The film just about bursts at the seams from the amount of scientific ideas at play here, especially the nanoscopic man, who always delights whenever he makes an appearance, even though he’s too small to see. The element of the pills as a driver of Zoya’s time travel adds a compelling layer to tried-and-true time loop narratives, as Zoya makes the active choice to keep herself in the time loop. With so much exciting science happening, though, the film’s shift to the more quotidian aspects of Zoya’s life can’t help but feel less absorbing, even as it makes sense in the context of the story. Stories about being caught in a time loop are always about learning how to seize the day and appreciate even the most boring aspects of your life, so it’s not surprising that that’s where “Omni Loop” ends up. However, Zoya’s scientific work with Paula has so many thought-provoking, fun ideas at play that it feels like a disappointment when that shift in the story’s focus occurs. Britto manages a graceful ending, with an emotional climactic crescendo that Parker nails. Since those aspects of the film are its least compelling, it makes the ending a more bitter pill to swallow than it should be, resulting in a film that feels like much more of a disappointment than it actually is.
