This movie shows up on some lists for 2024’s weirdest of the year and it’s a variant on Groundhog Day format that claims to be fully self-aware of the fact that there are a lot of variants at this point–from the cheeky Happy Death Day to the coy Palm Springs to the ever-unspooling Russian Doll. It has a couple things going for it: one is the speed with which they introduce the premise (clocks in under the first five minutes) and agile ways in which they breeze past actual repetition of scenes through the use of clever montage cuts. Some movies feel like they are actually just the trailer because the length of the movie is basically the trailer plus flashbacks (particularly egregious in Madame Web), but Omni Loop kind of cannily sidesteps the visual bloat for the most part and then has you guessing at solutions that fit into the common tropes of the genre: she’ll go back in time and give it to herself! She’ll go back in time and father the girl who’s helping her! She’ll take more and…! And really that’s a lot of the fun of watching this with Friends who are constantly shouting at the screen for the first forty minutes before the winter sequence interlude in which Mary-Louise Parker meanders from her safely manicured loop in order to seek out new and better answers. Really, we ought to ask if a movie ought to be elevated chiefly based on its aesthetics and its unique ending, and Ayo Edebiri’s straight-faced delivery of some of the more absurdist elements of the futuristic technology, and mostly the answer seems to be that everyone has earned our goodwill to follow them along for 90 minutes.
