Second 'Verse, Same as the First

The pervasive sense that the movement of Time has lost all meaning isn't just for our own individual sliding-down-the-shower-wall moments any more! The movies have taken notice! Time Loop Movies might be somewhat more prominent in Japanese cinema right now -- I think it must have been the one-two-punch success of One Cut of the Dead and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, which were then followed up by River and the upcoming horror flick Exit 8 (and I should note that every single movie I just mentioned is terrific and you should seek them all out). It's not like we haven't had our own love affair with this subgenre blooming in our cinematic margins, though -- look no further than the entire ouerve of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who've moved on up to the Marvel level of filmmaking after making a name for themselves with small-nudgeted mind-benders a la The Endless. 

Point being that while these sorts of movies have been around for ages they seem very hot right now if you know where to look, and where you should be looking is for the nearest theater playing writer-director-brothers Kevin and Matthew McManus' new movie Redux Redux, a wham-bammer or a brain-bender that's in theaters today. I missed it at Fantasia last summer but finally caught up with it this week and this should prove a calling-card of cinematic excellence for the filmmakers previously behind the unnerving horror The Block Island Sound. 

That movie also starred McManus sister Michaela, and here she turns up again to play our lead Irene, a broken woman who's taken to jumping through wormholes to chase down and murder the man who murdered her daughter -- and yeah okay so this is a multi-verse movie, not a time-travel movie, but it plays out basically the same as the process has becomes no less than a hyper-violent Groundhog Day for her. 

As in all of the previous movies mentioned the tech and special-effects are all lo-fi, battered and beaten crapola a la Ridley Scott's Alien freighter -- the focus remains on the way these science-fiction concepts are mangling with the emotions and mental-stability of our characters, and this quest that Irene is on is a doozy of one. Forcing her to re-live her trauma in an endless circle, violence begetting violence until the very idea of revenge reveals itself to be as empty and useless as it truly is. There can be no catharsis when her daughrter's killer inescapably remains in an infinite number of universes -- it's a brilliant way of showing that there is only sense in trying to fix ourselves, and that the monsters that haunt us will forever haunt us if we can't let them go or find some way to move on.

For Irene this comes in a couple forms -- she strikes up a sporadic one-sided love-affair with dreamy dude Jonathan (played by dreamy dude Jim Cummings), and she gets way too mixed up with another one of the victims of her daughter's killer, a young woman named Mia (Stella Marcus) who wants her own revenge. And to the filmmakers' extensive credit absolutely none of this plays out like we think it will -- their script swerves in all sorts of unexpected ways, managing to be an absolute thrill-ride while never losing sight of its profound emotional stakes. I'll just end with this -- if thoughtful genre movies like Redux Redux were what Hollywood was actually churning out right now we'd be so much better off. As movie-lovers, as a species. Go see this movie.