Zoya Lowe (Mary Louise Parker) only has five days to live. There’s a black hole growing in her chest, right between her lungs — and when it gets big enough, she’ll be sucked right into oblivion. It’s an ironic end for a theoretical physicist, as black holes are more likely discovered in the bodies of astronauts. Zoya has never been to space, though there was a time when she believed that she could do anything. But the ambitions she courted as a young woman have since been snuffed out by the monotony of life, of marriage, of motherhood. Now all that remains is the black hole, and five days of “relaxation” with loved ones: her husband Donald (Carlos Jacott), daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt), and catatonic mother (Fern Katz).
Except Zoya can’t be bothered with the tearful farewells or the quality time. In fact, it almost seems like she’s waiting for something. Those assumptions are confirmed when Day Five rolls around and she excuses herself from a farewell dinner with her family. Alone in the bathroom, Zoya pulls out a curious bottle of pills. She takes one and disappears, waking up again five days prior. Then, she does it all again.
Zoya’s ability to cheat mortality would be great if she wasn’t already so hopelessly bored with it. She’s relived her final days more times than she can count. In fact, she’s been using these mysterious pills to hop back in time for the whole of her adult life — they may even be the reason for the black hole in her chest. But when Zoya inexplicably meets Paula (Ayo Edebiri), breaking the endless loop she’s been living in, our heroine realizes that those pills can also be her salvation.
So begins Bernardo Britto’s Omni Loop, a kooky, Kaufman-esque remix of the time-loop story. Before multiverse stories sprung up to take their place, time travel was the trope du jour for lo-fi science fiction. That means that, like Zoya, we’ve probably seen it all before — and Omni Loop strives to cut through the sort of table-setting that’s since become a bit tedious for students of the genre. Each time Zoya resets, snappy editing skips through the moments we’ve already seen, while Britto’s script works to introduce new wrinkles to the plot. No new timeline is all that similar to the last, especially once Zoya meets Paula. Zoya does need to bring her protégé up to speed about her condition — and every time she takes a pill, she has to convince Paula to help her all over again. But Omni Loop takes that in stride with an efficient remix of the “let me prove I’m a time-traveler!” scene. And conveniently, it never takes much for Paula to agree to help Zoya. That keeps this story’s opening moments from stumbling over its ever-regenerating plot.
Omni Loop’s premise is straightforward enough at first. Zoya wants to rekindle the work she began in school, reverse-engineering the chemical properties of her mysterious pills in order to go even further back in time; to recapture her youth, her ambition, and the opportunities she squandered. Paula, a psychics student at a local university, is uniquely qualified to help her out. What she actually gets out of this exchange is a little less defined — but given that Zoya is a walking cautionary tale, ruled by regret and indignation, it’s relatively easy to find the motivation that Britto’s script seems to forget. Their quest is also buoyed by some fun sci-fi gimmicks, like the “Nanoscopic Man,” a scientist who’s perpetually shrinking (think Ant-Man, but even tinier) after an experiment gone wrong. But it gets harder to ignore the holes in this story once Zoya’s research hits yet another wall.
It’s here that Omni Loop starts to stumble. The story tries to compensate by packing on the emotional stakes, pivoting from Zoya’s abuse of time to examine the effect it might have on those closest to her. And that choice does initially work, as it gives both Parker and Edebiri an opportunity to flex their dramatic chops. The duo flits effortlessly between the fizzy, off-beat comedy of Omni Loop’s first act and the existential dread of its second. But just when the film settles into another groove, its focus pivots again, abandoning grounded sci-fi for more existential melodrama. It’s a frustrating choice for a story that starts on such a balanced, assured note, especially once its most interesting threads — like Paula’s own regrets, and her growing dependence on Zoya — are eventually left unexplored.
Still, you can’t fault a film like Omni Loop for its ambitions. Britto is working hard to mine an overdeveloped genre for new stories, and he does come close to succeeding. But there are moments when you wish the story would take its own advice, finding contentment in what it has instead of endlessly striving for more. Given that the film clocks in at 110 minutes, one would expect Omni Loop to explore each of its ideas in full. In the end, though, you’re left with a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and each of its storylines suffers as a result.
