Synchronic movie review & film summary (2020)

But it's still far more stimulating than most of the films and TV series that call themselves science fiction. It puts thought into the science of its premise, and reveals how things work via the scientific method (literally; Mackie's former physics student-turned-paramedic does the same thing over and over again on purpose, with minor variations, taking notes as he goes). It never resorts to having characters explain how stuff works when it can visualize the process by having people perform actions. And while it offers some gripping and/or darkly beautiful images, it's ultimately more about ideas than spectacle, proving (like every previous film by this team) that you don't need tons of money to create an engrossing work of science fiction and/or fantasy. 

I'm being vague here because I enjoyed having no idea where "Synchronic" was going, what motivated the two main characters, whether it would turn out be an action film, a horror film or some kind of metaphysical mystery (it's a bit of all three), even what the title meant (turns out it's an allusion to both drug slang and an aspect of one theory of time). Those who would rather experience the movie cold should duck out at the end of this paragraph and return later.

Benson and Moorhead's prior films (including "Spring" and "The Endless") were distinguished by how they improbably balanced two types of genre films that tend to draw very different audiences: the kind where you are allowed to understand everything that's happening, leaving no mystery unsolved by the end, and the kind that leave a certain amount of conceptual negative space that you have to fill in on your own. "Synchronic" is another tightrope walk. After establishing the properties of the title substance—a mind-altering designer drug in pill form, sold in single-dose packets that look like condoms from a distance—it lets Mackie's bitter, intellectual, self-negating main character, Steve, figure out what it does. 

By the two-thirds mark in the story, we have a good idea of the gist: take a pill, a la Lewis Carroll's Alice, and you can enter a different time period while remaining in more or less the same geographical space, then stay there for seven minutes. 

Once the process has been established, the film concentrates on the physical experience of taking the drug, and the way it alters Steve's sense of time and existence and makes him feel new things. And that's where the lyricism and mystery come in, expressed in arresting shots (by Moorhead, the film's cinematographer) of starry night skies and galactic panoramas, and in flash-cuts that signal shifts in Steve's consciousness (including "Bringing Out the Dead"—style, upside-down cityscapes, lyrical slow-motion, and a "Tenet"-like image of an ambulance moving in reverse).