Sci-fi or is it? Omni Loop certainly doesn’t look or feel like a sci-fi movie. In fact it’s all about human foibles, regrets, the life lived rather than the life that could have been lived. But its ostensible story – a woman reliving the last week of her life over and over again thanks to a magic time-travelling pill – has sci-fi written all over it.
Groundhog Week, you could call it. The action sets out from the point where Mary-Louise Parker’s Zoya Lowe is given a terminal diagnosis. Heading home from the hospital to die with the family, instead of breathing her last with them at the decisive moment she takes one of the magic pills that she’s had in a bottle since she was a 12-year-old girl.
The story then follows Zoya, a writer of academic books about quantum mechanics, as she relives the same week over and over, eventually realising that her new rinse-and-repeat existence isn’t the answer – existential ennui written large on the face of Parker, who does this sort of thing well. It’s here that a new person suddenly pops into her otherwise unchanging life, a physics student called Paula, played by Ayo Edebiri with the same perky dedication seen in the TV show The Bear.
Together they set off on a quest, en route running in to Zoya’s old professor (Harris Yulin), who was ancient when she was a student 30-ish years before. He jokes he’s 107 and the storyline leaves him right there with that utterance, no further elucidation or examination offered or given.
They also “meet” the nanoscopic man, an experiment-gone-wrong who is so small he cannot be seen. Another plotline that is largely unexplored, though the nanoscopic man is able, thanks to his microscopic size, to help Zoya and Paula investigate what’s in the magic pills that gives them time-travelling properties, or so we’re told.
The nanoscopic man is, at a molecular level, the element of genius in writer/director Bernardo Britto’s film, who has added him just for the hell of it. He’s not necessary, except to keep the film more firmly grounded in sci-fi. The same could be said for the arpeggiating chords on old-school synths in composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s score.
They’re a smoke screen. Because this isn’t really a sci-fi movie at all, it’s a very human drama about a middle aged woman realising the next big event in her life is the end of it, and regretting that she never took full advantage of her gifts and talents. Finally dealing with the psychological damage inflicted by parents. Facing up to the fact that death is certain and must be dealt with, at first intellectually, but eventually as a physical fact.
It’s handy that both Parker and Edebiri are good at the emoting thing, because they get to do a lot of it, and work hard at making Zoya and Paula a plausible team, who have to start again from scratch every week, when Zoya re-introduces herself to Paula, explains who she is and how she’s from the future (or is it the past?).
The fact that there’s a spare laboratory they can work in is handy, but also indicative of Britto’s writing – he’s not interested too much in plausibility, and the way he just slips in the fact that the nanoscopic man happened to have a particle detector in his pocket at the moment he became the incredible shrinking man just underlines that. Britto also has only a modicum of enthusiasm for time paradoxes and the like.
Don’t expect a special-effects feast. One of the magic pills moves a bit as the nanoscopic man interrogates it (invisibly) with his particle detector but there’s not much more superficial sci-fi stuff in this film than that. A shonky graphic or two, maybe ten seconds max, and that’s as much as you get, or the film needs.
Yup, it goes a bit slack in the middle, when the repetitive nature of Zoya’s life bleeds through into the dramatic ambience, but stick with it, the journey is worth it and by the end, when Zoya’s come to the only real conclusion that ever seemed likely, it all feels somehow just right.
Omni Loop – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
