Each loop starts with Lowe’s husband Donald and her daughter Jayne taking her home from the hospital and trying to make her comfortable, but she has gone through it so many times, she now just goes through the motions. However, she finally snaps out of it when she literally runs into Paula Campos, a young student carrying the quantum physics textbook she wrote with her husband.
Campos also has access to a dusty but adequate lab, so Lowe convinces her, with the benefit of repeated time loops, to help her analyze her mystery pills, so she can finally crack the code of time travel. Frankly, Lowe has no idea where they came from. They were given to her when she was a young girl, under mysterious circumstances, and have always defied conventional analysis. However, Campos’s campus has an incredibly unusual very-science fictional asset that could provide a new way of looking at Lowe’s pills. Awkwardly, it is now also home to her cranky old academic advisor, Prof. Duselberg.
Omni Loop represents a dramatic departure from most time travel and time loop films, particularly in terms of the acutely human scale of the narrative. Britto develops several highly original sf wrinkles, but it is the emotions that really make a lasting impression. There might be a few logical gaps, especially if you are theoretical physicist, but it hardly matters, because the film works so pwerfully as such an honest family drama.
It is always refreshing when a filmmaker creates a mind-blowing science fiction film without flashy special effects. Omni Loop is a great example of what can be done with several original ideas and a strong cast. Very highly recommended, Omni Loop opens this Friday (9/20) in New York at the Loower Manhattan Drafthouse.
