'Omni Loop' Is a Dreadfully Convoluted Waste of Ayo Edebiri

By Melanie Fischer | Film | October 1, 2024 |

Omni Loop opens with a doctor informing quantum physicist Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) that she has a black hole in her chest. He does so matter-of-factly, like the condition is a particularly aggressive and quirky form of cancer, rare but established enough to quickly give a precise and damning prognosis: one week to live. Also, quite like cancer, and unlike an actual black hole, the ticking time bomb in Zoya’s chest apparently draws the line at killing its host and does not go on to consume nearby family, friends, or the rest of the planet.

As Zoya’s husband, fellow physicist and textbook co-author Donald (Carlos Jacott) and adult daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) struggle to come to terms with the devastating discovery, the woman herself seems oddly unmoved. The thing is, Zoya has actually had far more time than they have to process the news, as she’s already been stuck in a time loop for a lengthy but unspecified period of time, indefinitely postponing her imminent demise.

And here we must pause to address Omni Loop’s unique twist on the time loop tale, because Zoya is not “stuck” in the traditional Groundhog Day how-do-I-get-out-of-this sense. She is choosing to opt into the time loop, hoping to unravel the mysteries of time travel so she can go all the way back to her youth and make different life choices that will, with any luck, take her down a different path that doesn’t lead to death by internal black hole in her mid-50s.

But wait a minute, you might be thinking, doesn’t she already know how to time travel, then? Here’s the thing: at age 12, Zoya found a mysterious bottle of time travel pills in her backyard—an incredible tool that allowed her to ace every exam throughout her entire academic career (unlimited retakes), but has an annoying limitation: it only allows her to travel back five days in the past. But she’s certain that if she can figure out how to reverse engineer the mysterious wonder drug, all the secrets of the space-time continuum will reveal themselves to her. (Yeah, we’re talking manhwa-level plot device here.)

If you’re wondering how Ayo Edebiri fits into all this—she doesn’t, really, and this film is a waste of her talent. She plays a student named Paula, who Zoya becomes convinced the younger is the key to solving time travel after she sees the younger woman reading one of her textbooks. Why Zoya would be so convinced a student reading her book would be the secret to an unprecedented scientific breakthrough, when she, who literally wrote the book, has not been able to make any progress, is another mystery the film fails to unravel.

The sophomore feature from writer-director Bernardo Britto (Jacqueline Argentine), Omni Loop stumbles through a story that is at once too much and not enough. It’s a bit of a feathered fish; several individual components are decent enough, but they do not combine into a particularly engaging, or even entirely cohesive, whole.

Ultimately, the film is not held back by its weirdness so much as lack of weirdness, missing the wit and the visual panache that would be required to actually pull off its more bizarre swings. Instead, it ends up in an awkward gray area, a down-the-middle sci-fi drama that glances longingly towards Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, but only takes the feeblest of steps to actually move in that direction. Instead of whimsically quirky, it’s merely contrived.

As a rule of thumb, especially when going for a dramatic tone, focusing a story on science only ever works if you actually want to focus on science. Why? Because otherwise you end up trying to build an emotional journey that feels real on a foundation of nonsense that, unlike fantasy magic, is a fake, ad hoc version of something that actually exists. For stories that are just trying to have a good time, like Megan or Re-Animator, it really doesn’t matter. But for films actually trying to say something meaningful—which Omni Loop definitely is—building a narrative around a fake, ad hoc version of science that consists of meaningless technobabble and hot air infects its far more emphatic efforts towards emotional impact with that same sense of fakeness.

It’s one of the many reasons why films like Arrival, Gattaca, Contact or even Interstellar deliver emotional impact in a way that a film like Omni Loop, in spite of its efforts, truly does not.

To give credit where credit is due, Omni Loop does manage to explore a time travel story from a new angle. Unfortunately, the experience of watching it also suggests that perhaps there is a reason why no one ever explored it previously.

Omni Loop is now available on PVOD.