Omni Loop

With only a week to live, and a black hole growing in her chest, a quantum physicist finds herself stuck in a time loop. When she meets a very gifted student, the pair team up to try to save her life and break the cycle of the loop.

Diagnosed with a black hole growing in her chest, Zoya Lowe is a quantum physics textbook author with only one week left to live.

Luckily, or perhaps coincidentally, or maybe even intenionally, when she was 12 years old, Zoya found a mysterious bottle of pills. After some experimentation, she realizes that when she takes one of these pills, they will send her back in time five days. Throughout her life, she has used these pills for her benefit, turning herself into a recognized expert, and a success in her field, through the use of time loops, which has allowed her to obtain whatever correct answers she needed through a series of simple trial and error.

Now, in the hope of saving her life, she takes a pill.

After an untold length of time, perhaps years, Zoya has found no answer, and has been reduced to repeating the same five days over and over again, and then, every five days taking another pill, which is then replenished as she starts the loop over. For a long time, this was fine, better than dying at least, but lately Zoya has grown frustrated with being stuck in the same sad loop of her life with her husband and her adult daughter and son-in-law, and she decides to start looking for answers once again.

This is when she meets Paula, a research assistant studying time at a local community college. Zoya enlists her help in the hope that maybe fresh eyes can find a way to unlock the five day barrier limiting the pills, so that she can travel back even farther, and gain a better chance at altering her past. Reinvigorated, Zoya spends each newfive day loop ignoring her family, re-meeting Paula, and continuing their research, the pair seeming to grow closer with each new loop.

But still the answers Zoya seeks alludes her.

When she discovers that an old colleague who might have been able to help had passed away months ago, and she sees how his son misses his father, and how he lives with the regret that he and his father didn't spend enough time together, Zoya finally listens to the frantic voicemails that her family have been leaving her every cycle, and that's when she decides to reset her week one final time.

For her last loop, Zoya happily embraces the mundane events with her family, creating new memories. She also gives Paula a copy of their research, as well as the time travel pills, telling a confused Paula that maybe she will be the one to figure it all out. In the final moments before the loop closes, Zoya is shocked to learn for the first time that she is going to be a grandmother. She tells her family how much she loves them right before the black hole consumes her.

Omni Loop is set in an obviously sci-fi world, where the last rhino is being toured around zoos one final time before it dies, a shrink ray experiment caused a man to shrink down to miroscopic levels and is now stuck there, and Zoya Lowe has been reliving the same five days in a time loop for who knows how many years, due to a bottle of time travel pills, with her name on it, that she found lying in the grass in a park decades before, all so she can avoid having the black hole that is growing in her chest consume her.

Not only did I like the way that the various sci-fi ideas in this film are just casually tossed out here and there along way, I also liked how, much the same way that you wouldn't explain what a car does to a neighbor, the film doesn’t try to justify any of these things to us. To the characters, this is their world, and these are normal every day things, or at least, it's considered to be common knowledge that something like this would exist, and as the audience, you are expected to either keep up or don't. Because ultimately, all the little sci-fi details are just window dressing on a story that is more concerned with the story of its very relatably human characters.

Omni Loop is film about regrets, about the roads not taken. It's about the search for answers and greater meaning, and understanding what truly matters in life. It's the story of a “gifted” kid who has grown up to realize that maybe they weren’t that gifted after all. It’s a story all about second chances. And third chances. And fourth chances. It’s about the futility of railing against the finite amount of time you have, and it's also about facing the fact of your own mortality. It's a story about doing the right thing, finally, regardless of the mistakes of the past, and how long it took you to figure that out. It’s also about helping the next generation to see a better world, and trusting them to see to it themselves. And I found the way that the film uses its somewhat silly concepts to convey all this to be pretty impressive.

Of course, I did wonder... is Zoya really starting over each time she takes a pill, or is she actually creating enitrely new universes every time?

Maybe that doesn’t matter, but I still wondered.

Anyway, while it's a little overly indulgent with the montages, a maybe little too smugly self-assured of the deep meaning of its message, as well as a little too sappy and heavy-handed in its delivery, Omni Lopp really is a nice little film nonetheless. Plus, there's an interesting bit of commentary on the whole "gifted children, who it turns out were not that gifted after all, so they ended up not doing anything really, despite supposedly having so much potential" thing.

Not too bad for a low budget, very casually genre flick. I enjoyed it.