Sync or Swim

We watched Synchronic (2019) partly because we had liked two of producer/director team Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead's other movies. But also, Netflix was pretty relentless in promoting this.

It stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as two paramedics in New Orleans. But first we see a couple in a hotel room take a drug, then find prehistoric vegetation in their room. She meets some sort of shaman, who lets a snake bite her. He goes out for ice, and when the elevator door opens, it opens on empty sky. He winds up at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

The guys are finding more and more odd drug deaths like this, along with the usual overdoses. A guy run through with a sword, for instance. Mackie traces the drug, a quasi-legal DMT analog designer drug called Synchronic, back to a smoke shop, where the spacy register girl sells him the last five packs and tells him it is discontinued. On his way out, a nervous business type tries to buy them from him. He turns out to be the scientist that created the drug and wants to get it off the street. You see, it can really cause time travel.

We have seen that Mackie is a player with the ladies, and it looks like Dornan wants to be, but he's married with a baby and a teen daughter - a moody, distant teen. When the daughter disappears, and a drug-den denizen mentions her name, it looks like she has taken Synchronic and time-travelled. So Mackie starts taking Synchronic to find her.

This is kind of interesting - the experimentation all captured on video, the tests of what you can do in the past, what you can bring back, etc. I'm going to give you all a little spoiler - he kills his dog Hawking while trying this out. It's kind of unforgivable. A lot of negative reviews mention this. Especially because Hawking is clearly a nod to Doc Brown's Einstein. 

This is not as trippy as the other movies of theirs we saw. The hypermasculine pair of leads are pretty hackneyed, and no one else has much of a character. There were some setups that didn't really go anywhere, like the scientist. I think he went out the door muttering about "just one more sample to get rid of", and I figured that would be a plot point. Nope, never heard from again. Maybe a set up for a sequel.

This was not the horror movie I expected, although some of the drug stuff was a little hard. It wasn't much of a thriller either. Really, the best part was Mackie working out the mechanics of the drug, and that was marred by the sacrifice of poor Hawking. Sigh.