Mark Reviews Movies: SYNCHRONIC

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 22, 2020

It's best not really to think about the central gimmick of Synchronic, in which a drug allows people (or condemns them, depending on one's perspective and/or the consequences of the trip) to travel back in time. Screenwriter/co-director Justin Benson is smart to evade too much of an explanation of the shaky science behind the drug (The explanation almost seems to exist to point out why our protagonist is conveniently—well, inconveniently for him—a good candidate to take full advantage of the drug's effects). Benson is smarter to develop a plot that primarily deals with the consequences of the pill, not the logic—or lack thereof—behind it.

The drug works. That's the important thing. Sometime after ingesting a dose of Synchronic, a person will go back in time, either as a kind of spectral figure or physically—depending on the degree of calcification over the person's pineal gland.

Does the biology behind the effect matter? It does, but only to the degree that our main character, a paramedic in New Orleans, has a tumor in that part of the brain, which has prevented his body from former a hard barrier around the gland. Because of that, his brain is more susceptible to the drug's effect. Basically, Synchronic will let him physically go back in time, instead of just vaguely existing there.

As complicated as this sounds, it's pretty simply put and passed by within the movie itself. Benson and co-director Aaron Moorhead are more concerned with the fact that Steve (Anthony Mackie), the paramedic, can travel through time and what he does with that opportunity. The latter is also pretty straightforward: He has to find his best friend's daughter, who took the drug and now appears to be trapped in the past.

At first and for a while, the story only seems vaguely interested in the drug. We get a prologue of sorts, showing a couple taking a pill each, being treated to some sights of the past (a dense jungle for her and a sprawling desert for him), and dying because of the trip (a snakebite for her and a long fall for him).

After that, the drug kind of exists in the background. On the job, Steve and his best friend/fellow paramedic Dennis (Jamie Dornan) come across several people who took the drug and died in mysterious ways: the couple at the start, someone who was burned alive with no surrounding signs of a fire, and someone who was stabbed with a sword.

The characters kind of take over from the premise. Steve is a lifelong bachelor, whose night life of going out and one-night stands is covering up his real desire for a real romantic connection. Dennis is married to Tara (Katie Aselton), and the two have an 18-year-old daughter named Brianna (Ally Ioannides) and a newborn. The marriage has become shaky.

After having headaches, Steve receives the diagnosis of the tumor, which is inoperable but treatable with radiation. While he silently deals with the symptoms of the tumor and the treatment, Dennis becomes increasingly agitated on account of his marriage and the suspicion that his best friend is becoming self-destructive.

It's telling, perhaps, that Dennis and all of his problems ultimately don't matter much to this story. For that matter, Steve's issues, as severe as they are, don't matter beyond how they tie into the eventual plot. After all, Benson and Moorhead have a gimmick to explain and explore, and that becomes the focus of the movie.

After learning about Synchronic and seeing the consequences of using it, Steve buys a shop's remaining supply to get it off the streets. Dr. Kermani (Ramiz Monsef), the man who created the drug, follows Steve, says he is trying to destroy any trace of his invention, and offers the explanation of how it works. Shortly after, Brianna disappears from a party, leaving behind an empty package of the drug, and Steve decides to figure out the mechanics of drug-induced time travel to rescue her from the past.

The resulting story is engaging, if only because Benson presents the logic of the central gimmick as a series of amateur experiments conducted by Steve. He learns the rules as he goes, essentially, going back into a few periods of the past (During an ice age, he has a moment of bonding with an early human, and during a period of overt racism, he has to avoid a lot of angry, murderous folks) and figuring out how to return.

That concept works in terms of transforming what amounts to a lot of exposition into an actual narrative. There are legitimate stakes to Steve's experiments, from what he doesn't know and has to learn to the assorted obstacles presented by each of his trips to the past, and each new detail about the how the drug works gets him closer to attempting a rescue. It's a clever trick, simultaneously presenting background information and making step-by-step progress within the plot.

In the end, though, it all feels a bit too shallow and superficial. The filmmakers' approach to this gimmick is entirely about how it fits into and drives the plot, avoiding any ideas beyond the story and eventually leaving behind the characters, too. Synchronic is clever in how it goes about explaining its plot mechanics, but they also end up being the full extent of this story.

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