3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Omni Loop

2024, Bernardo Britto (Jacqueline Argentine) -- download

I had every intention and expectation of doing this write-up as a Loopty Loo post, as the movie is, as the title suggests, about loops. But in watching, it is less about looping than it is about time travel, and it is less about time travel, as it is about living a life. And yet it does begin with the trope -- "Careful, " Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker, Weeds) says to the elderly lady about to sit on a bench at the rest home where Zoya's mother stays, just before a bird leaves a big plop of poo. "How did you know?" And you know what her answer is -- that she has lived this before, many times before. She's in a loop.

How did she get into the loop? When Zoya was 12 years old, she found a bottle of pills in a field. That bottle had her name on it. When she takes a pill, it sends her back five days. The pill bottle never empties. But now, decades later, it has had its consequences. Zoya has a black hole growing in her chest. These are her last five days, which she is living over and over. She wakes up in the hospital, she gets the news from her distraught but supportive family, and then they live, with her, for the next five days, until she has a nose bleed while blowing out candles on her 55th birthday cake, goes into the bathroom and takes the pill.

So, in some ways, its most definitely not a time loop movie. She isn't stuck, she doesn't have to find her way out. The way out is either living onward, or death. And yet we get to play with the tropes a wee bit. Zoya decides she doesn't want to die with regrets, nor just keep looping these same sad five days. And as fate would have it, she bumps into a young woman named Paula (Ayo Edebiri, The Bear) who is carrying a book on quantum mechanics that Zoya wrote. You see, Zoya is not just a woman going through time, but also a woman who spent a good part of her life studying time. That is, until she decided she would settle on living a life with a husband and child, and gave it all up. But bumping into Paula, literally, she finds a new path during those five days, and recruits Paula into unraveling the mystery of the pills, and their time travel abilities.

Except that's not what the movie is about, either. This movie is about the life Zoya chose over unraveling the mysteries of the universe. You see, Zoya has built a life on being brilliant, but is she? She admits she did so well on university tests because she knew the answers; time looping allows for that, quite easily. A professor accuses her of being lazy and unfocused and entitled. That's because she comes to knowledge by way of the answers, not the hard study, at first, I imagine. But eventually, given enough five day loops, she learned enough to write text books on the topic. But it seems she tired of that, and gave it up to become a mother and a wife. But now, in her final five days, she wonders if she regrets it.

This is a weird movie in a weird universe. When she is diagnosed, there is no, "How the fuck do you exist with a black hole growing in your chest?!?!?" The world isn't panicking, its not going to suck in everything in our solar system. It will just kill Zoya and doctors, despite saying they have never encountered it before, are calm. "Take her home, make her comfortable," they say. There is also a dying "last one-horned rhino in the world" and a plastic box containing The Nanoscopic Man, a man who was the subject of an experiment and is now shrinking, forever -- he is already molecular. His box is stored away in an aging, forgotten, professor's drawer. 

Zoya and Paul do end up spending many many MANY loops trying to figure out the power of the pills, but to no avail. The movie just breezes right past the challenges Zoya must be presented with in having to bring Paula up to speed on every previous iteration's experiments. Zoya hopes to break the five day timeframe, perhaps to go back far enough to choose a different life, but the more and more she loops, away from her family, focused only on the work with Paula, the more she comes to value the family time more than the expected benefits to cracking the code. Finally, she sees what she really wanted most out of life, and she had it.

Complete spoilers hereafter.

Zoya has always blown out those candles, seen the drops of the beginning nose bleed, but never opened the birthday presents her family have brought. Until that last "day", when she presents all her studies on time, and on the pills, to another new iteration of Paula, telling her to "proceed" with the work without her, for she knows Paula has her own very personal reasons to go back further than five days. And Zoya she goes home, opens the present, sees that she is going to be a grandmother, and they will name the little girl Zoya. She finally sees she has had a completely full life, and her regrets were silly. And the black hole sucks her in with a pop, and she's gone. No more loops, no more Zoya.

This is why I watch movies. Stories that make me think, touch on emotions, touch on ideas, leave me thinking long afterward. In some ways this was why this blog was created; to record those thoughts, and find rebuttal and/or furtherance. 

Finally, there is a toss away scene, one which makes a small comment on Loopty Loo's in that, each time Zoya pops a pill, she disappears, but the time loop continues. It is a reality, a time line, from which she has escaped but it doesn't go away. So in a way they are not loops at all, but a generation of new time lines in their multitude. I love that idea, something new for the sub-genre I love so.