Michael Atkinson
OK Gen-Zers, leggo yer multiverse this and multiverse that — it’s older than your great-granddad’s first pulp paperback, used as a term by William James as early as 1895 and as an evergreen sci-fi concept forever since, with the spanking original Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” (1967) being merely the most well-known old-timey manifestation. Like thrifting and Coke floats, it only feels new to you. All of which makes the McManus brothers’ new film, Redux Redux, merely a spare, inventive, genre-doped B-movie, of the sort we have for too long taken for granted. Blessed are the Bs, especially in the new century; they can return the overpaved parking lots of blockbuster retail to weedy pasture, allowing metaphors to sprout with fungal spontaneity. You look past the shortcuts and textural stumbles while other, stranger things might happen. Redux Redux endeavors to be a kind of skid-row action film, but it’s really just a little explosion of ideas popping out of the genre-stuff. The movie transpires mostly in roadstops and diners, and the F/X of interdimensional passage is limited to a little friction smoke.
We first see Irene (Michaela McManus, sister of bros Kevin and Matthew) in a rough montage, burning, knifing, and head-shotting a single bearded guy (Jeremy Holm), each a different incident — and then stalking him again in a series of scrub-Cali burbs and backroads, and exactly what is going on is only hinted at, via a fat set of keys, a recurring briefcase with a tape-handled pistol, and so on. We’re not supposed to know, until she finds the same guy again, kills him in front of some cops, escapes to a dingy motel, climbs into the large portable-generator-type machine she’s stored there, and ker-blam — with a whiff of ozone, the contraption vanishes and then manifests in another, yet identical, room, except there are no cops.
(Saban Films)
It’s during a liaison with a clueless dolt who she detours away from an NA meeting — a rather charming Jim (Thunder Road) Cummings — that Irene offers us exposition (22 minutes in; too soon?). She’s a nowhere woman on a multidimensional vengeance tour, using the device to search the multiverse rather hopelessly for the one level in which her daughter is unmurdered — and in the process compulsively killing the predator responsible over and over, an untold number of times. Even the NA guy is an episode on endless repeat, with only minor variations: “the closest thing I have to a monogamous relationship,” Irene says. (Since time is, Billy Pilgrim-ishly, unstuck for Irene, the implication is that she’s been doing this for aeons, and hasn’t aged. She never runs into herself either, because in all but her original dimension, she’s a suicide.)
This liminal odyssey kinks up for Irene when, during her umpteenth invasion of the predator’s shack, she finds for the first time another kidnapped girl, Mia (Stella Marcus), a tough nut and foster-home vet used to being victimized, who eventually learns — via another chase and close call — about the multiversal possibilities, which seem like a pretty thrilling life option to her. From there, Redux Redux does the dance, backfooting it between metaphoric insights and predictable cliché-hustles, in ways that suggest the McManuses, however compelled to take low-budget risks, kinda want to climb onto the A tier. That’s fair, but too bad — the film (their third) wastes no time explaining the junk science and is at its best when leaving us with the chewables, the taut genre expressions of compulsion and parenting anxiety and being middle-aged, stuck in a life you can’t control. Regrettably, the characters are a little one-note, and neither actress goes anywhere particularly painful or daring; Irene should be a frayed lunatic, given her situation, but instead she’s a tightly coiled warrior-mom. Still, all told, the movie’s a good deal less overbearing and cartoonish than Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the ultimate payoff smells like human sweat, not bubble gum.