Well-crafted ‘Synchronic’ takes viewers on strange trip
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead of “The Endless” continue to create a new “Twilight Zone”-like body of work with “Synchronic.” Their latest entry unites American Anthony Mackie (“Avengers: Endgame”) and Irishman Jamie Dornan (“50 Shades Darker”) as a pair of New Orleans paramedics who find themselves treating victims of the new, dangerous designer drug called Synchronic.
In opening scenes, the bickering paramedics treat a young woman in a hotel room with a snakebite. For his part, her male companion is in pieces at the bottom of the hotel elevator. Steve (Mackie), a physics buff, lives alone with his dog Hawking. He’s a player, who met Tara (Katie Aselton) before his partner and best friend Dennis (Dornan) did. Steve and Dennis were once medical students together. Dennis and Tara got married. They have both an 18year-old daughter, Brianna (Ally Ioannides), and 1-yearold son, and Dennis is not entirely thrilled at the development. Dennis is also worried about Steve, who has been taking too many pain killers and having too many hangovers at work. In a major plot twist, Steve and Dennis discover that Brianna has taken Synchronic at a friend’s house and gone missing.
“Synchronic” might be seen as an expanded riff on the unforgettable 1962 episode of “The Twilight Zone” entitled “Little Girl Lost,” which also featured a dog in its plot. The story was based on a 1953 short story by the great Richard Matheson, author of “I Am Legend” and 16 episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Like the physicist friend from “Little Girl Lost,” Steve develops a theory about what happened to Brianna and tries to replicate the conditions in order to get her back.
To be honest, the fantasy elements of “Synchronic,” which include visuals reminiscent of “The Endless,” take a back seat to the powerful depictions of two men in their 40s on different life paths, but determined to maintain their longtime mutually rewarding friendship and working partnership.
Steve films himself taking Synchronic “trips” in an effort to leave “found footage” for his friend. The visual effects (Moorhead once again doubled as cinematographer) and “soundscapes” by Jimmy LaValle give “Synchronic” a dreamy existential element. Steve is haunted by images of coffins unearthed by Katrina.
One of the weirdest visions in “Synchronic isn’t the scene in which Steve and Dennis treat a drunken man made up as Baron Samedi. It’s of a patient in a mesh mask receiving radiation treatment. One might argue that the “trips” taken on the drug, including a visit to a white supremacist settlement, are a form of cinema, which transports audiences to other worlds. In one of these in “Synchronic,” we’re in another “Terminator” movie version of the future.
A perfect pandemic offering, “Synchronic” is the cinema forever unspooling in all of our heads.
(“Synchronic” contains drug use, profanity and disturbing images.)