"Omni Loop," by Bernardo Britto, is a science fiction movie that's more driven by concepts and emotions than by hardware or action. It starts by matter-of-factly laying out a premise that you have to accept in order for every other element to work: its heroine Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) has been diagnosed by doctors as having a black hole in her chest and will die in five days. One byproduct of her condition—the only one that matters, in terms of the viewer's relationship with the movie—is that she seems unconstrained by the usual perception of time as a linear phenomenon, where you know what's already happened to you but don't know what hasn't happened yet. You could even say that her condition approximates the opening sentence of one of the most famous of all science fiction novels, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."
The movie begins at the beginning, kind of. Zoya, a bestselling science fiction novelist, is in the hospital with her daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) and husband Donald (Carlos Jacott), being apprised of her condition. There's a horribly funny moment where hospital staff in the background of a shot suddenly burst into cheers, and the doctor shamefacedly explains that they're watching a big game they've been looking forward to. This moment will recur as the movie unspools, along with countless other moments, all of which Zoya is aware of, in the tradition of the protagonists of other nonlinear, time-looping films, including "Groundhog Day," "The Edge of Tomorrow," as well as non-science fiction movies that are told nonlinearly, such as "All That Jazz," "Six Degrees of Separation," and just about anything by Christopher Nolan. Zoya is aware of them because she's been taking a pharmaceutical that allows her to travel back in time one week, and has used the medicine before. Zoya becomes conscious of her predicament and strives not only to understand it but to master it, in hopes of changing what would seem to be an immutable destiny: to die. The film becomes sort of a buddy movie when Zoya latches onto a science student named Paula (Ayo Edebiri of "The Bear") that she hopes can help get her out of this mess.
Additionally, as is so often the case with this kind of movie, "Omni Loop" is also a way of engaging with the act of watching movies, for the first time, and again and again. There's a scene in "Groundhog Day" where Bill Murray's hero, having accepted his predicament, sits calmly in a restaurant and narrates everything that's about to happen around him, like a filmmaker calling action on a film set for a take that's been done so many times that the number on the clapper has two digits. There are moments like that in "Omni Loop" as well, where Aya is telling other characters what is about to happen because it has happened already, whether it's an introduction in a medical facility or bird droppings hitting a bench.
Now that I think about it, a world that I used higher up in this piece,"unspools," is the wrong word. Rather than delete it, I'm leaving it in because it's evidence of this movie's thought provoking nature that I suddenly got self-conscious about it and wondered why. Here's why: it's a twentieth century analog word, redolent of thread, yarn, water hoses and such. It comes from a time when movies were mostly shot on film and projected on big reels that fed strips of celluloid through a projector, starting with the head and ending with the tail. Film is about as linear a medium in terms of its physical characteristics, as you'll ever find. "Omni Loop," as its title certifies, is not like that, not at all.
There are a lot of points, especially early on in the running time (another linear term!), when you might get confused about what you're seeing, what it means, where you are in the story, and what kind of film you're watching. But, luckily, this also happens to be one of those kinds of movies that teaches you how to watch it, and, by the end, if you've committed to it fully, you'll be fluent in the language it's using. Why? Probably because, when you think about it, this kind of storytelling gets closer to the way the human mind operates than the kind of storytelling usually practiced by feature films. The cutting (by the director, who absolutely has his own distinctive editing style that doesn't feel quite like anyone else's) is so fast, at times verging on strobe-flash fast, that you may feel as if you're inside somebody else's head, not just watching a feature film with a theoretically objective or third-person perspective.
This is an impressive movie that feels much bigger than it is, and even when it seems to be coasting a bit on its own arresting look and vibe, you don't mind very much because it's a seductive and thought provoking ride with sensitive and surprising performances, by Parker especially.
