‘The present is a miracle…’
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have already created some of the most chilling, mind bending, sci-fi/horror hybrids in the game during the last decade, namely Resolution and The Endless. Those movies played with our perception of time in a way that was both thought provoking and genuinely disturbing. In many ways, Synchronic is a spiritual sequel to those movies and feels like a natural evolution for a pair of filmmakers who have earned a bigger budget and an all star cast…
Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) are a pair of New Orleans paramedics who start to fall down the rabbit hole of a new designer drug that seems to have a disastrous effect on its users. When it starts to affect their own family members, they must work together to prevent a tragedy.
An intriguing concept and one that pushes the boundaries of what a time travel movie can be. This feels like a realistic portrayal of what it would actually be like to travel back to an era in which people were more primitive. In Synchronic, the past is a not just a foreign country, it is a dangerous and violent place, and this manifests itself in some gleefully gruesome scenes that further showcase Benson and Moorhead’s ability to create a scene that will sear itself into your brain.
Both Mackie and Dornan go all in here, and both are great throughout, capturing the ethereal quality of when the extraordinary becomes mundane. The whole movie has a dreamlike quality, and could easily have succumbed to silliness, but the two leads ensure that Synchronic remains grounded and based in reality, even in its more outlandish moments.
Often, an overly ambitious film can fall between two stools if attempting to be two things at once. Synchronic is a great sci/fi movie and a great horror movie. Fans of either genre should make this movie a priority.