‘Synchronic’: A Time-Travel Movie About The Present
The future is full of could-be and what-if and the past is done, while the here and now is so vitally amazing.
The team from Rustic Films is back with another science-fiction dive into the philosophy of life and love. Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson make the types of genre films that speak to your soul while entertaining the hell out of you. From Resolutionto Springto The Endless,they have honed their talents and their team to make the flicks that give us relatable people struggling with real-life problems in unreal situations. Synchronic is their announcement that they’ll be household names.
Moorhead and Benson’s latest work is a novel approach to the time-travel genre: a story about the necessity of being present. Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play Steve and Dennis, a couple of paramedics working in New Orleans who wind up responding to scenes of horrific deaths. The corpses are weird, though. There’s death by cutlass in an apartment, exploded body parts after an impossible fall down an elevator shaft, a body burned beyond recognition in the open air of an abandoned amusement park holding a doorknob, or a snakebite from a snake that hasn’t lived in this part of the world in decades.
The poor souls have one thing in common: the wrapper for a designer drug called synchronic is found near all of the gruesome scenes. The persistence of the synchronic wrappers isn’t much more than a curiosity for the paramedics given the overwhelming oddity of the gruesome aftermaths. That is, until Dennis’s daughter Brianna, played by Ally Ionnides, disappears after taking the drug. Where has she gone? Who is making this drug? And just what the hell is synchronic doing to these people?
Benson, who co-directs and writes, has come up with another script that will keep you hooked from start to finish. His blend of philosophy, humor, and desire to engage with the genuine human conundrum of how to handle our own mortality mashes up nicely with the team’s penchant for gnarly mysteries. A drug that takes you out of time is the unreal situation their characters are forced to confront if they want to save Brianna.
While not particularly similar in plot, Synchronic left me thinking about the philosophy underpinning Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, for its exploration of the blessing of mortality. Or, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s R100, for its understanding that suffering and pain and joy and pleasure are, at the end of our lives, all the same: amazing. These experiences are our lives, and at the end, it’s easy to see how fucking amazing it is to live.
What Synchronic ultimately becomes is a time-travel story about the present. Our hopes and dreams and the expectations placed on ourselves become the prisons which prevent us from experiencing the here and now. The closer we get to death, the more we realize the value of the clarity of mortality.
The pains of expectation become paralyzing. Whether we are constantly focused on the future we feel we need to realize or stuck living the failures of our past, the effect is the same. A glimpse of mortality is enough to put into perspective that while hopes and dreams may guide us towards who we could become, all we ever really have is who we are here and now. Sometimes that means pain. Sadness. Loss. Other times, it means joy, love, and friendship. All of it is life.
In the film, Steve says at one point: “When you’re staring down at the end, you realize there are far worse things than death. And none of those things are what you were upset about.” You realize how fucking amazing it is to be alive. Here. Now. The present is a miracle.
Dennis is a man lost in his past and present. One daughter is eighteen, ready to venture off into the world on her own, and his new child is brand new. As a paramedic confronting the eventualities of death every night, Dornan convincingly portrays a father struggling with the balance of letting someone go and protecting new life while being intimately familiar with how everything ends no matter what he does.
Steve, on the other hand, has no meaningful present and no future. With no real connections outside of his workmate Dennis, he’s left with a series of one-night stands with women whose names he can’t even remember and a dog. The struggle of his story is the struggle of all our lives: if death is eventual, how do we not lose ourselves to nihilism?
Mackie’s role is surprisingly challenging given the number and variety of emotional places his character experiences in the course of the film. Synchronic wouldn’t work half as well as it does without Mackie’s blend of humor and ability to share the soul of his characters in a look, or a gesture, or a middle finger. His choices in roles lately have been on fire. The man is absolutely a joy in Joe Lynch’s Point Blank, and he continues to impress in his genre pieces. His work in Synchronic only further demonstrates that he is one of the best working actors today.
Benson’s script and Mackie and Dornan’s excellent performances left me emotionally in a similar state as Only Lovers Left Alive. In that film, as Tilda Swinton’s Eve says to a soul-searching, demoralized Tom Hiddleston’s Adam: “How can you have lived for so long and still not get it? This self-obsession is a waste of living that could be spent on surviving things. Appreciating nature. Nurturing kindness and friendship. And dancing!”
All this emphasis on storytelling and philosophy isn’t to say the film isn’t a technical level-up from their previous films. Moorhead’s cinematography is excellent. The shots blending past and present are visually stunning. In David Bruckner’s The Ritual, there’s an amazing sequence that merges the interior of a liquor store with a forest. The visual effects team and camera work for Synchronic runs with that idea and expands it across a kaleidoscope of landscapes.
As filmmakers, their journey is an inspiring one. Resolution was a passion project made for nothing on the backs of a team filled with creativity and the ability to craft something entrancing with no budget. As film-goers, we are always crying out for originality. From their beginning, this team has been bringing us something new. Spring justifiably earned them the respect of some of the leading Masters of Horror, like Guillermo del Toro. When they couldn’t get their next project off the ground, they decided that rather than being meeting-takers, they’d be filmmakers. So, they went out to the desert and shot The Endless. Again with nothing but creative passion. They came back from the desert with the kind of story about brotherly love and the cyclical nature of time that will keep you pondering your own cyclical nature for days.
Synchronic is their first picture under their own production house, Rustic Films. While the film isn’t nearly as meta as many felt The Endless to be, the heart of this story feels remarkably similar to where their career has taken them. Hopes and dreams of what could be are essential as we plan our future. But, plans are only ideas. When you find yourself in the here and now, which is where we always are, it’s essential to ask ourselves: what can we do today? Synchronic answers that question with a resounding: anything. And it can be fucking magic.