In Omni Loop, Mary-Louise Parker’s has-been physicist Zoya has a black hole growing where her heart should be. The doctor’s diagnosis is grim—she has maybe a week left, and no one in the medical field has any idea how to patch up the chasm of spacetime in Zoya’s chest. Her family tries to make her comfortable and fill her final days with as much cloying close time as possible, but Zoya is sick of spending time with them amidst her death sentence.
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OMNI LOOP ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars) |
It’s not that she dislikes her family; she loves her husband Donald (Carlos Jacott) and treasures her daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt). The problem is that she’s lived this last week before, over and over. See, when she was twelve, Zoya happened upon a mysterious pill bottle labeled with her name, and these pills have the power to pop her a week back in time. She’s had unlimited chances for most of her life, and now that her life is drawing to a close, she’s desperate to find a way to go further back, to escape the hell of her final week.
Enter Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a physics lab assistant at the local community college who Zoya is able to convince of her Groundhog Day-esque plight. They team up to do some vague sciencing, giving Zoya a new perspective on how she’s spent her life thus far and how she wants to spend the rest of it. It’s an emotional story about dealing with death and grappling with regret at the end of one’s days, which the early deadpan tone and purposefully choppy editing might belie.
Omni Loop is good enough at telling a story sweetly, but it does falter in its 110-minute runtime. The sci-fi elements are left to the wayside at times, even when they seem ripe for making metaphors and deepening the story. It’s a bit of an odd choice to kick things off with a metastasizing chest cavity only to focus on Zoya’s mystery time travel pills instead, and the former really doesn’t add much other than a ticking clock. The strange pills do get an interesting, almost religious layer for Zoya, given that they were bestowed upon her of all people, but the script only throws out a few lines about purpose or lack thereof.
The movie languishes in its ultimate moral about what a life well lived really looks like, stretching out its third act into a trying tearjerker. Will it wring a few tears from your eyes? Probably, but that’s more a testament to Parker’s performance than anything else. She communicates Zoya’s end of life crisis so well, bridging the gaps between her myriad timelines with a few facial expressions or expertly delivered lines. The high concept of it all depends on her ability to make it seem not only real, but exhaustively lived in, and Parker more than nails it.
She also enjoys stellar chemistry with Edebiri, who continues to be one of the most exciting, entertaining talents working today. Some of the richest parts of Omni Loop come when Zoya gets to see herself in Paula, finding the same passion she had when she was young. Their many moments together speak to a path not taken for Zoya, as she tries to set Paula up for the scientific success that she opted not to pursue. The friendship transcends space and time, and the bond that the two actresses cultivate is really something special.
That impact does get dulled by the film’s frequent heavy-handedness, from Paula’s shoehorned tragic backstory to Zoya’s ultimate decision regarding how she lives the remainder of her life. When the two women are together, there’s a sense of new beginnings, of reinvention later in life being possible, but Omni Loop backs out of fully committing to that idea in favor of something more saccharine. It still ends up at a sweet spot that focuses on appreciating what you have while you have it. But there’s another story somewhere in there with something more to stay.
