Rating: NR | Runtime: 112 minutes
Release Date: September 20th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Director(s): Bernardo Britto
Writer(s): Bernardo Britto

I’ve done this before.

It will always be easier to regret what we don’t have than cherish what we do because that which we possess is safely assured regardless of the risks taken to achieve it. So, we inevitably crave the allure of more. Of different. Of the idea of “better” without knowing if it actually would be better at all. We choose to look back rather than push forward precisely because the moment is gone. We romanticize it and maintain its illusion since consequences don’t matter to a hypothetical. And we devalue where we ended up by losing ourselves in the belief that our current life is that consequence.

This is the headspace in which we meet Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) at the start of Bernardo Britto’s Omni Loop. It’s the headspace we’ll soon discover she’s been mired in since she was twelve years old. Because that’s when she first took one of the inexplicable pills that have allowed her countless five-day do-overs. Take one and you wake up in the past to make a different decision, give yourself more time, or retake that test you failed. And they never deplete either since you’ll be regaining consciousness before you ever took it. We’re talking time travel in a bottle that erases instant regret. Enough of a miracle to make you want more.

Five days might solve a simple mistake, but it can’t fix anything outside that window. Just because Zoya didn’t regret starting a family with husband Donald (Carlos Jacott) and daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) at the time doesn’t mean she won’t decades down the line upon realizing her research remained incomplete. Research that might have cracked the code of those pills to wield time travel outside of their built-in constraint. If she kept with it, maybe she wouldn’t be dying of a black hole (the film’s sci-fi is very goofy). At least not right now. Not after prolonging her demise five days at a time for so long that she’s begun to resent the seemingly rote motions of love.

So, Zoya decides to pivot by spending these infinite five-day stretches to solve the problem she couldn’t thirty years prior when she chose motherhood instead. (Britto wielding Zoya’s life as a binary career vs. family battle without middle ground is admittedly unfortunate, but it does purposefully augment the inherent themes at play.) She recruits Paula (Ayo Edebiri) after a chance meeting, figuring out a shorthand to get her on-board as quickly as possible each restart to keep moving their experiments forward. The two get so wrapped up in the work that everything else is neglected—including Paula’s own autonomy in the project. Zoya becomes so obsessed with her own desire that she never considers her partner’s.

Hence the binary. Could Zoya have lived a life where she loved Donald and Jayne while also continuing her research? Of course. Would it have allowed her to be so passionate about one over the other that this burning desire to change everything ignited? No. Zoya needs to have given one up for the other to crave the “what if” of a do-over. And she needs to give up the other in pursuit of that one to finally see why she made the original choice in the first place. It all goes back to our age-old yearning for immortality always forgetting death’s importance to life’s equation. If Zoya does find a solution to time travel, won’t she just end up regretting the need to erase the life and love she already had?

It’s the crux of Omni Loop and effectively delivered through the mirrors Britto creates with Paula and Zoya’s ex-classmate and contemporary Mark (Eddie Cahill). He uses them for that purpose so he can keep Zoya invested in her compulsion. He can gradually and imperceptibly move her and the film away from the family and into the research with humor and excitement so that we forget the dynamic completely until the bottom drops. Just like the lie Zoya is telling herself, we believe this quest is for her family. But it’s not. It’s about pride. Hubris. It’s about labeling everything she has done as meaningless and everything she could still do as worthy.

Only when the choice arises again to slap Zoya awake does clarity arrive for her to recognize that despite the price paid being imaginary then, it is very real now. Paula therefore becomes an example of who she was. Mark becomes a vision of who she might be if it works. And Zoya opens her eyes back up to remember who she is. It’s a much deeper role than you might initially assume, and Parker excels at delivering that complexity at the perfect moments. Edebiri, Harris Yulin, and the rest of the cast provide wonderful support, but this is Parker’s film. From the boredom to the intensity to the sorrow and joy, it’s all worth getting to one final revelation that even Zoya forgets is still lingering upon the horizon.

---

Mary-Louise Parker and Ayo Edebiri in OMNI LOOP; courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.