This little science fiction film takes time loops on a new track

In Groundhog Dayan inexplicable force—perhaps divine, certainly moral—traps misanthropic weatherman Bill Murray in a single, repetitive day until he sheds his attitude and becomes a better man. In Palm Springsbumbling wedding guests Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti fall into a time loop vortex, an astronomical wonder, in a cave. In Edge of tomorrowTom Cruise and Emily Blunt battle an alien invasion over and over again on the same day after being infected with the time loop through the aliens’ blood. In Source codeJake Gyllenhaal is a reluctant guinea pig who is forced by his military superiors to perform an eight-minute simulation over and over until he gets the right result.

Omni-loop is a time-loop film with one important difference. It’s not the length of time, although Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) has the relatively luxurious span of a week to live over and over again. It’s a matter of choice. In most time-loop films, the characters have somehow become trapped in the loop against their will and are looking for a way out of an existential nightmare. In Omni-loopZoya decides to take a pill and start the week over again, every time.

Why? Because she’s dying from a black hole in her chest. This is one of the many wildly imaginative details in the otherwise normal world of Omni-loop that are treated as unremarkable by the characters; it’s a film that exists in a strange space between science fiction, grounded drama, and magical realism. Another such detail is a nanoscopic man who, like Ant-Man, lives in a subatomic realm in a Perspex box and communicates with the outside world via text message. And no one seems to question the provenance of the bottle of time-loop pills that Zoya remembers finding as a girl, with her name on the label. She hints that she’s been taking the pills, which never seem to run out, her whole life.

Is that why she dies from a black hole in her chest? And where did those pills come from anyway? It’s not a spoiler to say that Omni-loop doesn’t answer these questions. If you’re looking for these kinds of answers, you’re watching the wrong movie. Omni-loop Writer-director Bernardo Britto has no qualms about his film being an overt metaphor, eschewing the need to explain plot mechanisms or scientific aspects.

What he has created is a quietly moving little film about loss, acceptance and self-worth. Zoya is a theoretical physicist, like her husband, Donald (Carlos Jacott), but after a promising start at Princeton, her career never really took off, and she has devoted at least as much of her life to her family — she has a grown daughter, Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) — as to her research. Now, consumed by regret at the end of her life, she continues to choose to relive her last seven days, even as she grows frustrated and bored by her family’s sugary attempts to make them special.

Sparks fly when she encounters Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a lab assistant who carries one of Zoya’s textbooks. Zoya tells Paula the secret of her existence in the time loop and begins avoiding her family, running away from the hospital, and reintroducing herself to Paula so they can continue her old research. The pair attempt to reverse-engineer the pills so she can travel further back in time and do something about the literal hole in her heart.

The metaphor is pretty obvious, but if the film works, it’s because of Parker and Edebiri. Two comedic actors with great range and a quietly nervous edge, they’re well-matched and have a great rapport; Edebiri is a warm, understated scene partner for Parker, who would otherwise be stranded, weighed down by the weight of an entire film about one woman’s inner life. It’s just a shame that Edebiri’s role never quite makes sense as a character in her own right. Her motives are either unclear or a little too emotionally convenient, and the evolution of her relationship with Zoya rings false as she continually meets her for the first time.

The real joy of Omni-loop is seeing Parker take on such a substantial role. You probably remember her as the suburban mom turned pot dealer in Weedsalways absently sipping a giant iced coffee, saucer-shaped eyes displaying a quicksilver mix of bewilderment, sarcastic detachment and girlish glee. She’s a vibrant screen presence and a terrific actress, and she pulls what would otherwise be a rather flat ending to Zoya’s story into something honest and moving.

Omni-loop takes its name from an offshoot of Miami’s Metromover transit system — an elevated, automated monorail system from the 1980s that now looks a bit retro-futuristic. Britto films scenes of the characters on these trains to accentuate the film’s subtle, washed-out sci-fi aesthetic. But the futurism of the title doesn’t really suit the film; it’s not a dystopian exploration of time and identity like Source code. Nor is it interested in exploiting all the dramatic and comedic variations (let alone the philosophical and ethical implications) of being stuck in time, such as Groundhog Day does. The time loop is not an existential trap or a satirical device.

Omni-loop uses repetition in a more intimate and psychological way; it is a time-loop film for the therapy age. Britto’s ambitions are smaller and the film is sometimes vague. But ultimately, thanks to Parker, it does succeed in reaching an emotional truth about a person stuck while facing perhaps the most difficult thing a person can face: the end and the resulting reckoning with everything that came before.

Omni-loop is now playing in theaters.