Synchronic: A Time Travelling Treat

 

Watch if you liked: Tenet

Directors:  Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

Year of Release: 2019

Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins.

Rotten Tomatoes (not that it matters): 80%

Violencemeter: Sword wound, snakebite, open fracture, bullet wound, burns, death from falling down an elevator shaft

“People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

-Albert Einstein

For starters, I’m a Netflix hater. I don’t think anything ever good ever comes out of surfing Netflix. All you can ever find there are shows with a great first season followed by 5 more lousy ones. Or shows with hype in the mainstream media. I was wrong.

Plus sometimes, something good can come out of morons hyping up good shows. Like The Queen’s Gambit. Dark. A Series of Unfortunate Events. Sex Education. Unbelievable. Stranger Things. One Day at a Time. [Titles of your sex tape?]

If someone were to say that a series of events is ‘synchronic’, they mean that all the events happened, arose or existed at precisely the same time. Imagine every war in history happening with the fatal meteor shower that sent dinosaurs into extinction happening right along with the big bang that resulted in the birth of the universe. Crazy, amirite?

Allow me to paint you a better picture.

Imagine if it were possible for you to exist at the moment you were conceived (ew, sorry) and the moment you had sex for the first time (again, sorry. Also, sorry if you haven’t had sex yet). If I told you that the moment you fell in love for the first time exists right alongside the one when you got heartbroken for the first time, would you believe me? How would you feel if I told you that the deepest, darkest moments of your life exist at the exact same time as the brightest, happiest days of your life? 

If I told you that the classic concept of time and everything we know about it is just a result of our naive perception of it and has nothing to do with how it actually works; that we see things happen in a linear flow because our brains are too dumb to comprehend the complexity of time, would you believe me?

Synchronic is a little recipe cooked with this premise serving as its basic ingredient. Two paramedics, Steve and Dennis, (played by Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan) in their line of duty begin responding to a series of strange injuries and deaths with one common factor binding them all together - all of their victims were found to ingest a designer drug called Synchronic. Some of these people end up with a bite from a snake which hasn’t been found in the region for over two centuries, some end up with anachronistic objects on them, while others are much less fortunate(think: dead). With more and more bizarre incidents being reported and being linked to Synchronic, the drug is ultimately pulled off the shelf but not before Brianna, Dennis’s daughter goes missing after having taken the same drug. Curious and concerned, Steve buys out the remaining stock of the drug from a store and throws them away, until he learns of what the drug really does from Dr Kermani, the chemist who invented them. 

So, what really was up with all the incidents? Was their connection to the drug purely coincidental or was it just a cover-up for something even bigger? Do they ever find Brianna? What does Dr Kermani tell Steve that forces him to recover them? And what does all of this have to do with our flawed understanding of the flow of time?

Watch it to find out!

Synchronic is available to watch on Netflix.

I’d give the movie a solid ⅗ but fuck what I think, decide for yourself

If nothing, this movie will change how you look at time. A little. I think.