Respond to these rapid questions in our Synchronic quiz and we will tell you which Synchronic character you are. Play it now.
When it comes to the filmmaking team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, one of the best compliments that can be paid is the observation that their films are more interesting when you don’t know anything about them. Starting with that statement begs the question of why anyone would want to read this review in the first place. Perhaps you shouldn’t; perhaps you should just watch their most recent feature, “Synchronic,” instead.
Although this story of enhanced perception, relativity, time, chance, and fate is intriguing, it is far from perfect. It takes an excessive amount of time to establish its premise. However, it does not delve as deeply into the minds of its two likable leads (a couple of New Orleans paramedics played by Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan who are investigating a string of ghastly, drug-related deaths) as it repeatedly promises. As a result, the film’s climactic act of heroism doesn’t quite feel as monumental as it should, in part because we’ve been told the backstory of the relevant character without being given the opportunity to truly feel it from within.
However, it is still far more stimulating than the majority of science fiction films and television series that are marketed as such. It takes the scientific method (literally; Mackie’s former physics student-turned-paramedic does the same thing over and over again on purpose, with minor variations, and takes notes as he goes) and applies it to the science of its premise to reveal how things work. There is never a need to resort to having characters explain how things work when the process can be visualized by having people perform actions instead. And while it contains some gripping and/or darkly beautiful images, it is ultimately more about ideas than spectacle, demonstrating (as has been the case with every previous film by this team) that you do not require a lot of money to create an engrossing work of science fiction and/or fantasy literature.
It was fun to have no idea where “Synchronic” was going, what motivated the two main characters, whether it would turn out to be an action film, a horror film, or some kind of metaphysical mystery (it’s a little of all three), or even what the title meant (it turns out to be an allusion to both drug slang and an aspect of one theory of time). Those who would prefer to watch the movie in its entirety should leave the theater at the end of this paragraph and return later.
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“Spring” and “The Endless,” among other films, were notable for the way they improbably balanced two types of genre films that tend to draw very different audiences: the kind where you are allowed to understand everything that is happening, leaving no mystery unsolved by the end, and the kind that leaves a certain amount of conceptual negative space that you have to fill in on your own. “Synchronic” is yet another walk on a tightrope. As soon as it establishes some of the properties of the title substance—a mind-altering designer drug sold in single-dose packets that appear to be condoms from a distance—it leaves it up to Mackie’s bitter and intellectual main character Steve to figure out what it is doing.
At about the halfway point in the story, we have a good idea of the gist: take a pill, a la Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and you can travel to a different time period while remaining in the same geographical space, and then stay there for seven minutes to see what happens next.
Synchronic Quiz
Once the procedure has been established, the film focuses on the physical experience of taking the drug, as well as the way it alters Steve’s perception of time and existence, as well as his ability to experience new sensations. And it is here that the film’s lyricism and mystery are expressed, as in arresting shots (by Moorhead, the film’s cinematographer) of starry night skies and galactic panoramas, as well as flash-cuts that signal shifts in Steve’s consciousness (including upside-down cityscapes in the style of “Bringing Out the Dead,” lyrical slow-motion, and a “Tenet”-like image of an ambulance moving in reverse).
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Specifically, a scene in which the drug’s inventor uses a vinyl record album to explain time as a series of concentric, parallel tracks rather than a single long, straight line should be shown in both poetry and physics classes. Except for the fact that it serves to prepare us for the experiments that Steve is about to embark on, it is a lovely, hopeful image in a film that is otherwise dominated by fear and dread. “Synchronic,” which is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” (which Benson and Moorhead are uniquely suited to adapt), becomes the story of a man who chooses to become unstuck in time, partly because he needs to locate Dennis’ daughter (Ally Ioannides’ Brianna), who ingested the drug during a party and vanished; but mostly because his tragic past, tied to Hurricane Katrina, has transformed him Steve’s energy is reminiscent of all of the war veterans who went on to become detectives or gangsters in postwar crime fiction and film noir, as portrayed by Mackie, who is hardboiled without being overbearing in his performance.
However, to its credit, the script does not rely on that tired trope. Steve’s experience growing up as a Black man in America—particularly the former Confederate south—may be a significant factor in his current state of burnout, as is his partner’s married-with-children domesticity, which he perceives as a way of marking time on this planet, according to the novel. Throughout the film, the filmmakers come dangerously close to being scathingly political and anti-racist, only to fall short. However, the present-tense references to Steve being unwelcome in certain city neighborhoods, as well as the various bigoted whites in the time-travel sequences—including hooded Klansmen and a Confederate infantryman who believes Steve is his slave—confirm that we’re not reading too much into this aspect of the film.
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That said, “Synchronic” is more comfortable exploring a generalized sense of alienation, which is associated with the belief that life will never get better after a life-altering personal trauma (Steve’s problem, which dates back to Katrina), or that the best has already happened and things will only get worse from here (Dennis’ eventual viewpoint, after he loses his daughter and his marriage crumbles).
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The experience of (and description of) what it feels like to move through time linearly, as well as how that awareness is amplified by the loss of a loved one, an opportunity, a period of time in one’s life, or a sense of connection to a city or country, is also explored in lyrical form. Is it true that the dead and gone have been lost, taken away, decomposed, or disappeared? Or have they skipped ahead to a different track on the record album instead? Can we track them down? Is it possible that they can see us? Is it possible to feel them even when they aren’t present?
A lengthy discussion about death and life between Steve and Dennis is the film’s intellectual as well as emotional high point, and it serves as a powerful argument against succumbing to a morbid obsession. According to statistics, you know how you’re going to die (in a bed after a period of physical decline, like 98 percent of the population), but you have no idea how your life will unfold from one second to the next; this, in turn, means that life—specifically whatever moment you happen to be in—is where you should focus your attention, because it is guaranteed to be more exciting and surprising than the end.
This is the first scene in “Synchronic” in which Steve appears to be more than a passive audience surrogate, as he quotes Albert Einstein (who unpacked ideas of relativity, without which this film would not have been possible). A letter written by Einstein to the surviving family of his friend and former work colleague Michele Besse described Besse as having “preceded me a little in my departure from this strange world.” With his mournful and dejected expression on his face as he recites this and other sentences from memory, Mackie develops an intellectual gravity and bitter edge that only grows stronger as the story progresses. This is a man who has peeled back the curtain that has shrouded the vision of others and seen into the vastness of the cosmos.
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