APORIA - Mark Reviews Movies

Aporia, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 10, 2023

Filmmaker Jared Moshé screenplay for Aporia features a pretty novel conceit on its own and especially in regards to stories about time travel. Here, people don't move through time and/or space by way of some inexplicable physics, but people can move a very specific physical property through both time and space.

That element is a surge of energy that lasts only a brief moment and is completely undetectable to any observer. The practical uses of this technology, made by a couple of bored scientists in a spare room, are almost certainly limited, but as with most monumental breakthroughs in science and engineering, one of the inventors quickly realizes the device's potential to be used as a weapon.

It is, essentially, a sort of time-traveling bullet, fired from one place and time into a different place and time—with some restrictions, because the contraption was built out of spare and scrap parts—with no way for anyone to know what has happened or, if something has happened, who is responsible for it. This machine is capable of performing a perfect murder, in other words, while also altering the course of recent history. How does one even comprehend that level of power, let alone use it?

That—not the mechanics of the device or some elaborate plot—is the main question of Moshé's film. It's admirable that the writer/director has imagined such a unique idea involving time travel. It is even more so, though, Moshé doesn't simply rest on the ingenuity of his central gimmick. This is a film that establishes a tricky moral dilemma and actually follows through on examining the questions of power, temptation, and responsibility that the notion raises.

The story focuses on Sophie (Judy Greer), whose husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) was killed in a car collision caused by a drunk driver about a year ago. She and her daughter Taylor (Faithe Herman) have been struggling ever since, with Sophie taking on long shifts at the medical care facility where she works and Taylor losing interest in everything—especially science, since the girl's passion for it was driven by the fact that her late father was a physicist.

In fact, Taylor has been temporarily suspended from school from missing too many days, and if that trend keeps up, she'll be held back a year. Beyond that, the man who caused the fatal crash has just been released on bail, and Sophie worries that the person who killed her husband and her daughter's father might not face any real justice.

Things are dire for the two, so when Mal's best friend Jabir (Payman Maadi)—who has helped Sophie and Taylor the best he can—offers an unlikely proposition to the widow, she can't help but listen to and consider it. The idea is patently ridiculous, anyway, so what real harm, beyond giving Sophie false hope, could it do?

Before Mal's death, he and Jabir were tinkering with a possible time machine, but instead, they ended up creating the aforementioned, time-traveling-bullet-like device. Jabir could do some research and calculations, pinpoint where and when Mal's killer will be at some precise point before the incident, and kill that man before his actions would result in Mal's death.

Sophie agrees, and somehow, it works. Mal isn't dead in this new timeline, although Sophie and Jabir still remember that original past because they observed the process that changed the past.

That's just the start of this plot and the debates that result from this time-altering, morally queasy premise, which turns two of our main characters into righteous or selfish killers—or some combination of the two—and forces them, as well as the not-dead Mal, to confront the consequences. After all, Mal not dying is an obvious net benefit to Sophie and Jabir, as well as a Taylor who's completely ignorant to the existence of a past in which her father died, but can the life and influence of the man who would have killed Mal be reduced to a single, deadly action? Is it possible for decent, well-meaning people to live with the guilt of ending a life, even without any legal repercussions and with the self-evident ways that death has changed their own lives for the better?

Such are the queries Moshé puts forth, as Sophie and Mal, who knows his wife and best friend have saved his life because he's aware that and how the machine works, decide to look into the certain damage she and Jabir have done to the lives of Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), the now-dead man's wife, and Aggie (Veda Cienfuegos), the broken couple's ailing daughter. What they find, though, doesn't change the trio's determination that the decision was the correct one—at least for them.

It does, however, get them to consider that perhaps another change to the timeline—meaning another use of the machine and another metaphysical killing—might fix some of the devastation the first use of the device has caused. Meanwhile, Jabir begins to see himself as a kind of retroactive vigilante, looking for avoidable tragedies that he could prevent from occurring by killing, for example, a future mass shooter.

There is plenty of mind-bending plotting happening here. While Moshé is pretty consistent with the rules and ramifications of the plot device and the underlying physics he has developed for this story, those concerns matter much less than the characters imagining, debating, and living with the consequences of their choices. That is far more engaging and thought-provoking than almost anything some elaborate, time-shifting plot could concoct, because Aporia cares about these characters, their desires, and, ultimately, their inability to control something as confounding as both the machine and, more importantly, what it represents.

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