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The first scene in “Omni Loop” cuts right to the chase – 55-year-old quantum physicist Zoya Lowe (Mary Louise-Parker) has a black hole growing in her chest and one week left to live. Given this exceptional premise, writer-director Bernardo Britto weaves an original and existential take on the “time loop” genre — though the film’s slow pace and overly cerebral approach weaken its emotional punch.
“Omni Loop” is far from the first film to explore the concept of time loops, but it innovates the genre by placing the power of the “loop” directly in the protagonist’s hands. Since childhood, Zoya has utilized an endless supply of mysterious green pills which allow her to jump back exactly one week in time.
When she was younger, the pills allowed her to retake tests, excel academically, and get ahead in her career, but after her diagnosis, she relies on them to stave off death. At any point, Zoya could stop taking her green pills, but doing so would mean succumbing to the black hole growing inside her.
Zoya receives her diagnosis at the hospital, drives home, visits her mother (Fern Katz), spends a day at the beach with her family, and has a “surprise” birthday party before her week repeats. She does this over and over again. Britto even shoots these repeated vignettes from the same angles, and the camera’s tight focus on Zoya visually constrains actress Mary Louise-Parker to underscore the maddening limitations of the loop that she is in. Britto commits to a patient portrayal of Zoya’s impossible predicament in the “loop,” and while the plodding pace of the film effectively forces the audience to feel the weight of Zoya’s repetitive life, its slowness risks losing the viewer to boredom.
A possible escape from Zoya’s loop comes in the form of Paula Campos (Ayo Edebiri), a graduate student studying time — an admittedly and strikingly vague detail. Zoya believes Paula can help her harness the pills to travel further back in time – specifically, to the beginning of her adult life. Zoya is haunted by missed opportunities, and her desire to avoid death is compounded by a desire to “retry life” – to go back thirty years and make different decisions that would maximize her professional potential.
Paula is a clear foil to Zoya, with her youth and intellectual promise painfully embodying the possibilities that Zoya surrendered when she became a mother. Britto attempts to flesh out Paula’s motivations by alluding to a tragic backstory, but this plotline is weakly developed. The result leaves Edebiri, fresh off a 2023 Emmy victory from her celebrated work on “The Bear,” as an awkward and superfluous character in Zoya’s deeply personal journey.
Returning to quantum research to save her own life forces Zoya to confront her abandonment of physics 30 years prior. Britto intersperses the bleakest moments of the film with the ephemera of Zoya’s youthful aspirations – polaroids from her childhood, graduation cards, and notes from teachers and mentors extolling her limitless potential – which are now packed in boxes under her bed. These sudden visual intrusions provide a bitter juxtaposition to the end of Zoya’s life and underscore “Omni Loop’s” exploration of what we lose when limitless potential fades into limited reality.
The first two acts of “Omni Loop” are emotionally muted, with Louise-Parker masterfully embodying a Zoya who approaches her demise coldly and clinically. She is strictly concerned with the business of death – making sure her textbook is published posthumously and finalizing her will – and the science of trying to stop it from occurring.
Zoya’s stubborn denialism develops the allegory for grief that lies at the heart of the film; however, it also impedes Zoya’s emotional connection to her husband (Carlos Jacott) and adult daughter (Hannah Pearl Utt), and these relationships ultimately play out on the screen as inauthentic and shallow.
Only when Zoya travels back to Princeton — where she met her husband and made some of the decisions that would haunt her later on — does the film burst into its most profound emotional expression. While at Princeton, Zoya visits the home of a former classmate who achieved the pinnacle of success within quantum physics, only to find that he, too, fruitlessly spent his last days searching for “more time.”
The image of Louise-Parker finally confronting the inevitability of her demise while listening to the grief-stricken voicemails of her family, who she neglected during her search for a cure, is visceral and explosive.
Certainly, “Omni Loop” is at its best when it allows its characters to emotionally inhabit the weighty existential questions the film seeks to explore. During Zoya’s final loop, she experiences the same moments she has lived dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. But this time, she is fully present with her family, allowing herself to grieve alongside them and cherishing each moment with fresh eyes.
Britto’s sci-fi drama falls slightly short of its potential, but still provides a valuable and inventive meditation on grief and loss.
—Staff writer Evelyn J. Carr can be reached at evelyn.carr@thecrimson.com.
