One of the key components about most time travel stories is about the element of control leading to a loss of control. We take one of the few, immutable elements of life—time’s unceasing flow—and then bend it to go somewhere else, and then that usually leads to unintended consequences. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s new movie Synchronic cleverly turns this premise on its head by telling a time travel story where the lack of control is built into the premise and the larger themes of the story. Whether it’s coping with illness or how to raise a child, we really have no control beyond how we treat the people we love. With total command of their brilliant premise, Benson and Moorhead have created one of the best time travel stories in recent memory while still packing an emotional wallop.

Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) are EMTs working the graveyard shift as they frequently come across violence and drug overdoses. Their lives are made even harder by a new designer drug called “synchronic”, which affects the pineal gland and makes the user literally travel through time during their dose. What’s more, since teenagers have underdeveloped pineal glands, there may be no return trip when they dose to another era. When Dennis’ daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides) disappears on a synchronic trip, Steve, who’s been diagnosed with an inoperable and fatal brain tumor, resolves to rescue the teenager, but to do so he has to figure out how to exert some kind of control over synchronic’s effects.

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Image via Well Go USA

While there are flashes of Benson and Moorhead playing with chronology and editing, they wisely choose to avoid confusing their audience. They play with time just enough to show its fungibility in this world and the fracturing of the characters’ psyches, but never so much that you lose the thread of the narrative. Instead, the filmmakers ensure that we learn alongside Steve exactly show synchronic works and how random the drug can be. While other time travel stories tend to give the user an element of direction, synchronic sends its user back to a random place in time based solely on where they’re standing when they take the drug. As Steve discovers, sending yourself to a random place and time, even if it’s only for seven minutes, is a dangerous proposition.

What elevates Synchronic is that Benson and Moorhead haven’t merely done a neat trick. The way synchronic works is meant to mirror what Steve and Dennis are experiencing in their personal lives. Steve, a young man in seemingly good health, has been struck with terminal cancer. Dennis and his wife Tara (Katie Aselton) are good, attentive parents, but their daughter still did a drug that could cause her death. We exist in a random universe, so why shouldn’t time travel in that universe be random as well? The only thing we can control is how we respond to the randomness, and that’s an oddly inspiring tale, especially right now when everything feels so chaotic.

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Image via Well Go USA

Synchronic is just trippy enough to be intriguing while never being so psychedelic and strange that it alienates the audience. Instead, the film holds a sinister, ominous tone of an uncaring universe filled with decay and deterioration. The world of Synchronic is not a pleasant place, especially for guys like Steve and Dennis who are trying to save those seeking a drug-fueled escape only to come back stabbed by a conquistador or something. Synchronic isn’t about salvaging the past or even preserving the future, but finding peace with a random present, and that’s the kind of story we could all use right about now.

Rating: B+

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