Drugs, time travel and fatigued paramedics

 

    Time travel movies may not have dime-a-dozen familiarity, but they're not exactly novel either. That means that directors who venture into this territory must do so with an awareness that they need to come up with something that feels fresh. 

    Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who directed the tantalizing Endless, take an unusual approach in Synchronic, a movie with a time-travel twist. They tell a story that doesn't appear to be about time travel at all -- at last initially.

   Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan portray two New Orleans paramedics, best friends who are bombarded by constant drug-overdose calls, so much so that Synchronic looks like another foray into the world of drugs and despair but it's not quite that either.

   Synchronic, by the way, is a powerful pill that opens those who swallow it to seven minutes of time travel that takes place from the exact spot where the drug has been taken. Travelers play a game of time-travel roulette: They can't control the period in which they land.

  Synchronic puts plenty on its plate: friendship, the vanished daughter on Dornan's character, a crumbling marriage, a terminal disease from which Mackie's character suffers and travel to various moments in history -- the Ice Age to the time of the Conquistadors among them.

   As the movie's principal time-traveler, Mackie's Steve faces all manner of danger in his seven-minute forays into alternate realities, the idea being that past, present and future actually are concurrent. References to Einstein and physics are made, but the movie hardly qualifies as an intellectual exercise.

   The directors can't entirely fuse the movie's diverse elements and not everything about Synchronic works. For me, though, Mackie's complex character keeps the movie on track. Dornan holds his own, as well, and Synchronic nudges its way onto the plus side of the sci-fi ledger.

'The Endless,' a tricky little movie

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead join forces to direct and star in The Endless, a film that takes enough unexpected turns to provoke interest. Justin and Aaron — characters obviously named after their creators -- are brothers who fled a California commune a decade before the movie begins. Justin saw the commune as a cult — and a death cult at that. After the brothers learn that the members of the commune are still alive, younger brother Aaron begins to have fond recollections of the place. The food was good. People had fun. As Aaron remembers it, life on the commune seems better than the crummy lives the brothers now lead, scuffling for money in low-level jobs. Justin doesn’t buy it. He says appropriately named Arcadia was "culty," that all the adult males underwent castration and that no one living at the commune really was free. Nonetheless, a persistent Aaron insists that the brothers pay a one-day visit to their former home to gain closure. As the movie progresses, the strangeness grows ever stranger. Although the cult members seem friendly and reasonable, the sky above Arcadia sometimes glows with double moons -- and that's far from the weirdest development. No fair telling you where all this is headed, but Benson and Moorhead create an eerie little movie that effectively plays with time and mortality — and with our heads.