Omni Loop
Written and directed by Bernardo Britto
Starring: Mary Louise Parker, Ayo Edebiri, Carlos Jacott
Unrated
Rated Runtime: 107 minutes
On digital September 20

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

I’ve watched many, many, many time loop films. And some time loop episodes of TV (it seems like most sci-fi or magical shows that go on for any length of time have at least one). But none of them are quite like Omni Loop, a quietly ambitious entry into a staple genre. Most time loop films fall into one of two categories: a moralistic tale in which the protagonist is forced to relive a certain amount of time (usually 24 hours) over and over in order to become a better person (or at least, a less shitty person) or a puzzle tale in which the protagonist must relieve the events leading up to a terrible fate that the protagonist is desperately attempting to avoid. Or both. 

Omni Loop resists such straightforward use of the time loop trope, instead using it as a metaphor for reflection on a single life. The film opens with Zoya (Mary Louise Parker) in a hospital bed, her doctor giving her family the worst news a family can hear. Zoya is dying from a miniature black hole inside her lungs and only has a week to live. It becomes obvious—to anyone familiar with the genre—that Zoya has already lived this last week of her life many times. She goes to the beach with her family. She receives a terrible massage. She reviews the final proofs for her new entry into a series of popular science books she cowrites with her husband. She has the same conversation with the same lady on a bench at her mother’s nursing home. She is bored, listless, anticipating small accidents and missteps around her with an air of ennui. One day, she breaks the routine and (literally) runs into Paula Campos (Ayo Edibiri), a grad student working at a nearby college lab studying time. Invigorated by a new avenue in the loop, Zoya waits until the loop begins again in the hospital and escapes her family to find Paula so that they can use her lab to study the loop and, hopefully, find a way to travel back further into Zoya’s past to avoid her death.

It becomes apparent after the first half hour that Zoya is causing the loop to occur, an unusual twist on the genre. She explains to Paula that when she was 12, she found a pill bottle with her name on it in the middle of a field. Every time she takes a pill, she goes back in time exactly one week. She’s used it frequently throughout her life to help her ace tests or to perform well in school, but now she is using it to stave off the inevitable, taking it at the last possible moment before she dies (ironically, on her 55th birthday). Meeting Paula gives her an alternative: use the week to analyze the pills and figure out how to “go back 30 or 40 years and do all the things I always wanted to do.”

And just like that, Brazilian director Bernardo Britto has created a mechanism with which to explore a number of interconnected themes: the examination of alternative lives, the brief nature of human existence, the painful process of grieving one’s own death, and the rejection of the girl-boss “women can have it all” variety of feminism. Zoya remembers that when she picked up the bottle as a child, she heard a voice whispering to her that she was going to change the world, a phrase that has the potential to trigger Millennials everywhere. Zoya is not a Millennial: her loop actually resets after she takes the pill on her 55th birthday. Although the film is vague about its exact time period, we do know that it takes place in Miami in an alternative present or near future, so that would make Zoya a member of  Gen X. However, someone of her age would have been one of the first generations of women to absorb that second wave feminism “you can have it all” mentality, and in many ways, fulfilling that expectation, an expectation that she feels hasn’t played out, is Zoya’s goal for the first part of this film.

But most of all, Omni Loop is about the grief one has for all of the lives one could have led, brought into sharp focus by the knowledge of impending death. It would be easy for this film to boil Zoya’s desire to go back to relive the last 30 or 40 years as regret, but neither the film nor the character can be reduced that simply. What really makes this work is Parker’s performance: she is able to capture the complex, multi-faceted nature of Zoya’s pain, joy, rage, and fear as she engages with the meaning of her life here at the end. Edibiri, who is playing a Millennial, brings her characteristic charm and natural sense of comedy to the role, but Paula is also someone who is struggling with what her life means, especially in the face of this revelation that time travel is possible. Their relationship, in many ways, is one of generational discourse about feminism, meaning, and friendship, and what generations of women can learn from one another.

There is some really odd, thinky sci-fi here too. Paula asks Zoya to ponder whether, when she takes the pill and initiates the time loop, if that version of her family is stuck, just waiting for her to come back from the bathroom. Paula’s university contains one of the world’s foremost science experiments: a man who was successfully shrunk to a nanoscopic size, only he continues to shrink continuously, doomed to eventually pass out of contact with the rest of the world. These details only add to the metaphysical and emotional complexity of the world Zoya and Paula exist in. There are no clear cut answers, only the meaning that we find ourselves.