Jim (Chad Mcknight) is a physicist, working on time travel via a wormhole. His first major test appears to be a success when a Dalia flower mysteriously appears in his lab. From reviewing video, Jim believes a person also came through and that same night, by coincidence, he meets a beautiful woman, Abby (Brianne Davis) who seems to bring him luck and budding romance. However, Jim begins to experience severe headaches, and the strange behavior of those close to him make him suspicious that perhaps Abby, his benefactor Klaus Meisner (Michael Ironside), and even his own experiments are not what they appear to be.
Synchronicity dives headfirst into the time travel shenanigans that have become staples of this ‘time loop’ subgenre. The concept is well worn enough that the plot often feels like a familiar path that doesn’t stray too far from formula; all the requisite clues are hidden in plain sight along the way. It isn’t long before characters start lapping themselves and filling in the missing pieces of the story. From the first moment Jim and his colleagues fire up the time machine, we know to look for peculiarities that will be ‘ah ha’ moments later. It puts us a few steps ahead of Jim, who seems frustratingly blind to the reasonable possible outcomes of using his time machine.
Jim’s lack of foresight proves problematic in many ways. Jim is a brilliant scientist who has bankrupted himself and sacrificed everything for this project, yet he loses all common sense the moment he meets the femme fatale. Immediately he is consumed only by a desire to have as much sack time as possible with her, risking everything he has built. There are also a number of instances where the whole plot could be resolved with a simple, obvious choice and instead Jim needlessly chooses a more absurd and extreme option, jeopardizing himself and the universe in the process.
The really striking aspect of Synchronicity is how director Jacob Gentry has so perfectly captured the cinematic era of early 1980’s sci-fi and neo-noir movies. Many recent genre films pay heavy stylistic homage to that decade, but Synchronicity owns it. From the Ben Lovett synth score (that is incredibly close to Tangerine Dream and Vangelis) to the passive, almost dream-like cinematography style, I am hard pressed to think of a film that so authentically represents the movies of 1982. It’s as if Gentry were a time traveler himself, come to the future to show us how it’s done. Even the editing casts off the shackles of modern ‘quick cut’ techniques in favor of the longer shots of linear editing from thirty years ago.
Synchronicity is in theaters, on demand, and iTunes on January 22nd.
Adam Ruhl is a writer and life long Cinephile. He is the Executive
Cinema Editor of Pop Culture Beast’s Austin branch; covering festivals,
conventions, and new releases. When not filing reports, Adam can be
found stalking Alamo Drafthouse Programmers for leads on upcoming
DrafthouseFilms titles. Adam once blocked Harry Knowles entrance to a
theater until he was given extra tickets to a Roman Polanski movie.