Omni Loop (2024)

Omni Loop Review

A slight genre sci-fi film writer-director Bernardo Britto’s “Omni Loop,” is a sad time travel drama that makes Mary-Louise Parker look like a curious character. Zoya has one week left to live, and she can delay the inevitable by popping blue pills that take her back five days at a time. She would leave this world if she could. All she does is celebrate her 55th birthday, go to the beach and approve galleys for the physics book she wrote with her husband (Carlos Jacott). Life is predictable.

The only thing that saves Britto from having to do too much imaginative legwork in his high-concept sci-fi is Parker’s extraordinary physicality; he gives Zoya a black hole for a heart that doctors can’t explain. Her daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) discovers it’s most commonly found among astronauts and people who’ve had significant radiation exposure. But while Paula belongs to neither of those communities, Zoya wants out of where she’s at in the universe.

Paula (Ayo Edebiri) crosses paths with her when their books collide after a chance disruption in habit on Zoya’s part. Once they realize Paula studies metaphysics, Zoya abandons everything she’s learned over the past few days with her own family members who were seemingly introduced into her life by fate itself in favor of someone who might give her answers about how to get out of this loop.

Zoya and Paula begin their theories test at the community college, though really they are testing each other, asking existential questions without answers. Parker and Edebiri have a nice chemistry, but “Omni Loop” is not what you might expect for those anticipating comic fireworks from either Britto’s antic first feature “Jacqueline (Argentine)” or the presence of “The Bear” star. The director takes a commendably light touch, but sometimes the movie is too laid-back when it comes to these two talking in circles on their way to finding inner peace.

That peace is established more immediately by Britto and a talented crew that wants to tackle some big ideas. Whether through its canny use of Miami’s brutalist architecture or Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s delicate, warbling electronic score, the film gently incorporates slightly surreal elements in order to keep Zoya’s powers of deduction front and center. Everything points toward the hopeful idea that she can given all this human creativity in evidence as part of the tapestry of the film itself, how could she not? Time may be unraveling in “Omni Loop,” but it admirably opens up space for us to think less about the secrets of the wider universe than about smaller ones closer to home.

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