Loopy Lou

Omni Loop (2024) looked like a nice, low-key indie SF movie, swo we put it on. I guess we were right.

It stars Mary-Louise Parker, although we first see her as a child, all alone, picking up a bottle of pills while an seen voice tells her she, Zoya Lowe, is destined for greatness. Then, she wakes up in a hospital bed. The doctor is telling her adult daughter that she has a black hole in her chest and has maybe a week to live.  There is no treatment. 

So she goes home while her husband, daughter and son-in-law try to act normal. She goes to see her mother, who silently watches TV in a nursing home. Later, she sits on a bench outside and another elderly lady joins her. Parker tells her that they have had this conversation many times.

You see, she is in a timeloop situation. She wakes up in the hospital, goes home, visits her mother, and eventually she gets a nosebleed and takes one of the pills. Then she wakes up the hospital again. The woman doesn't believe her, but so what? She'll be redoing this day soon, and she can try something else.

Parker is a physicist, who has written an introductory text with her husband. She is publishing another, but the publishers know about her diagnosis. One night, her family throws her a little 55th birthday party, a few days early (for obvious reasons), then her nose starts bleeding. She takes a pill, and it's back on the loop.

But this time, at the nursing home, she runs into Eyo Edebiri, causing her to drop her books, including Parker's physics book. Parker is surprised - this has never happened in any previous loop. It turns out Edebiri has been raiding the home's library since no one else uses it. She has a rough life, and is working as a lab assistant at the community college. So Parker tells her about her situation, so they can work together. 

Next time around the loop, Parker runs off from the hospital instead of going home, and goes to find Edebiri. Edebiri suggests getting help from the Nanoscopic Man, a man who was testing a shrink ray, but had no way to stop shrinking. He is being kept by an old professor of Parker's, who tells her how lazy, entitled, uninspired, etc she has always been. Parker takes it, but they get the tiny man.

Edebiri and Parker now embark on a frantic attempt to figure out the magic pills and maybe Parker's black hole problem. It ends with Parker listening to the voice mails her frantic family have been leaving, desperate for her to come home. She holds off taking her pill for as long as she can, until the black hole starts to devour her. Then she takes it and wakes up in the hospital again.

This movie is about a lot of things, it seems. One is the question of what you would do if you only had a few days to live. Parker spends it with her family, doing things that she loves, but is that the right answer? Another issue is, when do you give up your dreams of, for example, being a great physicist, in exchange for a simple stable life? The answer seems to be, don't give up your dreams, but your family is most important. Ok?

There's another theme - Parker isn't really a great physicist. When she did poorly on a test, she'd just go back and relive that day, and ace it. This reminds me of people with imposter syndrome, because they "cheated" in school by studying hard. But maybe she wans't that good. It took Edebiri to get her off square one. 

And the movie kind of slighted Edebiri. She was picked up, given all Parker's problems, had her own problems ignored, then dropped. Of course, she didn't know she was dropped. That was in another loop. And in the end, Parker remembered her. But still - wasn't she a bit of a Magic Negro?

So I had some issues with the plot. Also, the movie could get quite slow - partly to show the banality and boredom of a time loop, and of living an ordinary life. It was set in Miami-Dade, and there are several scenes of the characters just travelling on the region's transport system, the Omni-Loop. You see this a lot in indie films like this - characters just riding pub trans, looking blank. 

But, all in all, I kind of liked this movie. It had a few minor SF touches, outside the time loop: the black hole and the Nanoscopic Man - and that was it. It was interesting to see a 55-year old woman as protagonist, with a living mother and daughter, and a husband who was a regular dope, but loving. I might have liked it better if it weren't so ordinary, but I don't think that's what writer/director Bernardo Britto had in mind. It was an interesting take on the time loop story.

In conclusion, you might be thinking, why didn't the pills run out? I worried about it until I realized - the pills take you back in time, to before you took the pill. So there was always the same number.