Studio: Well Go USA
Director: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Writer: Justin Benson
Producer: Michael Mendelsohn, David Lawson Jr., Aaron Moorhead, Justin Benson
Stars: Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Katie Aselton, Ally Ioannides, Ramiz Monsef, Bill Oberst Jr.
Review Score:
Summary:
Two paramedics have their personal lives upended when they investigate an epidemic involving a designer drug with otherworldly effects.
Review:
As far as I’m concerned, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s 2012 debut film “Resolution” (review here) remains one of horror’s Top Five most impressive DIY indies. For the record, Mike Flanagan’s “Absentia” (review here) will probably always be #1. Check out “The Deeper You Dig” (review here) as another candidate for the list.
If the glut of “found footage” garbage shot on a cellphone has you convinced “good” movies can’t actually be made by relative newcomers scraping and scrounging to build a film with friends, family, and favors, “Resolution” can change your mind. It is indeed rare. Yet every once in a while, someone turns out a believable, affecting, memorable movie with no stars and little money, but a whole hell of a lot of imaginative ingenuity. As with Flanagan, that describes Benson and Moorhead’s early work.
Since “Resolution,” the directing duo has continued building a loosely linked mythology as well as a uniquely identifiable brand of eeriness through “Spring” (review here) and “The Endless” (review here). That brand could be called “cosmic horror for the new millennium.” Benson and Moorhead have emerged as something of a modern day Lovecraft, playing with hallucinatory dread in ways similar to their predecessor before massive monsters overshadowed his explorations of otherworldly mindscapes. “Synchronic” also traffics in this territory where psychological subversion melds with tangible terror.
In addition to being best friends, Steve and Dennis work together as EMTs in New Orleans. Lately, they’ve been responding to alarmingly odd calls. A man stabbed with an old sword. A woman bitten by a snake inside her hotel room. Another man burned to death despite no evidence of a fire. These strange cases aren’t only linked by anachronistic and geographical inconsistencies. They’re linked by a mysterious designer drug called ‘synchronic.’
We come to learn that synchronic causes users to experience time “as it really is,” i.e. not linearly but fluidly. The drug enables people to effectually travel to other eras by “messing with” the pineal gland, which no horror fan can hear without immediately thinking of “From Beyond,” as if Lovecraftian influences weren’t evident enough.
Synchronic affects users differently however because young people do not have calcified pineal glands. That’s why they’re tripping through time and not coming back, which is what happens to Dennis’s teenage daughter Brianna. She’s now lost and no one knows where, or when, to look.
Luckily for Dennis, but unluckily for Steve, Steve has a terminal tumor on his pineal gland. He might have years yet to live or he could have only weeks. His doctor doesn’t know. But Steve knows he has had enough of synchronic tearing families apart, so he buys up the remaining supply. Then the idea hits. Maybe Steve can use synchronic to rescue Brianna for Dennis. He just has to figure out exactly how the drug works, and navigate a harrowing series of brain-bending encounters with cults, conquistadors, Neanderthals, and Ku Klux Klansmen to find her.
One of the signatures in Benson and Moorhead’s storytelling is the time they take to enrich characters through throwaway details. For instance, Dennis and his wife Tara have a one-year-old daughter as well as 18-year-old Brianna, which affords Dennis opportunities to momentarily muse on the challenges of stewarding a family with that atypical dynamic. Now, there’s no narrative requirement for Dennis to have a newborn. Another writer could easily get away with putting “has a wife and kids” in the script and be done with it. But this is one seemingly inconsequential addition that makes “Synchronic’s” world appear less artificially generic.
You can see more of what I mean in another example. On scattered occasions, Dennis half-jokingly expresses ongoing frustration toward his ambulance driver Tom, who is briefly seen once but never heard. “Synchronic” doesn’t have to include a moment where the ambulance suddenly swerves for a second. But the quick slap Dennis gives to the back of the driver divider while yelling “Tom!” furthers the feel that “Synchronic” takes place in a lived-in environment with arcs going on outside the edges of the 100-minute runtime. Not everything everyone does directly ties into the primary plot.
This is something Benson and Moorhead do. They build their people first and let the story naturally coalesce around them, rather than pushing characters into a premise that’s more important than the individuals are. This is how they derive character-driven drama that viewers read as relatable without the film becoming a traditional character study that’s better suited for arthouse ambiguity. This is also how something like “Synchronic” stays tethered to a plausible reality instead of floating away into its heady sci-fi fantasy.
Another way to put it is to say “Synchronic,” like Benson and Moorhead’s previous films, features extraordinary events affecting ordinary people. As bigger projects match their collective career’s growth, Benson and Moorhead of course have to anchor movies with names such as Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, who both melt into their roles here. Neither feels like they are “acting” so much as inhabiting an actual alter ego with organic dialogue delivery and honest interactions. But the rest of “Synchronic” gets populated with everyday faces who forge more strong links for the film’s grounded chain.
The drawback to dabbling in both “normal” drama and fantastical dreaminess is that “Synchronic’s” flow casually falls into dizziness from droning audio as well as visuals washed in desaturated patinas. Dried images and drowsy pacing accurately reflect the drug-induced mood dictated by the story. But the effect can be tiring for a viewer who gets hypnotized more by the texture than the fiction. “Synchronic” errs on the slow side. Benson and Moorhead movies always have. It just feels a bit more exhausting on this go, and that has as much to do with the subdued approach as it does with the mesmeric atmosphere.
I’m writing this after it was announced that Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead will next direct episodes of Marvel’s “Moon Knight” starring Oscar Isaac. As a longtime fan of the comic character, and as a longtime appreciator of Benson and Moorhead’s afore-described style, I can’t think of a more perfect pairing for that project. Benson and Moorhead’s affinity for psychologically struggling people facing terrible eldritch horror suits Marc Spector well. Bigger budgets and bigger scale are the logical next step for the filmmaking pair. “Moon Knight” can only build on the weirdness “Synchronic” samples, and it can only get more intense from here.
Review Score: 70
If you want to see impossible amounts of blood explode crimson colors like the world’s worst version of a gender reveal, well, “Abigail” at least has that.