‘Omni Loop’ Asks: What If You Had One Week to Live Forever?

The movies do not deserve Mary Louise Parker. Her work in the New York theater scene since the 1990s has been rightfully praised from Broadway to the Battery, and the serialized nature of television has allowed her to flex character-developing muscles and play the emotional scales several times over; say what you will about those later seasons of Weeds, the Showtime dramedy that cast Parker as a pot-selling suburbanite, but she always managed to throw in a look, an offbeat line reading or a bit of business that provided a nice second-hand high. No one has ever used iced coffee as an omnipresent prop better. When it comes to film, however, you often felt like this top-shelf actor consistently gets short shrift. Parker was always good when she showed up in ensemble pieces or some franchised blockbuster, but with the possible exception of Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), the medium hasn’t known how to take advantage of her gifts.

Omni Loop is, among many things, an offbeat buddy comedy, an existential nightmare of a character study, and a series of life lessons — you only live once, try to make the most of it, etc. — that stops right on the edge of sentimentality. It’s one of those indie films that takes pride in its smarts, knows which buttons to hit to lubricate your tear ducts, and might be best categorized as a heartfelt headscratcher. But what truly makes this a movie worth searching out is the way writer-director Bernardo Britto’s sideways take on carpe diem sets the stage for its lead to rage, and somehow never lets the high-concept premise eclipse the performance at the center of it. You could watch Parker breathe life into this woman wrestling with a metaphysical conundrum forever.

“Forever,” unsurprisingly, is a key word when you’re talking about a time loop, which is what Parker’s Zoya Lowe happens to be caught in. A writer of science textbooks on quantum physics and other eggheaded subjects, Lowe finds herself the last stages of dying. She’s been cursed with having a black hole inside of her — an actual black hole, not just a metaphorical or symbolic one — and doctors have given her roughly a week before it simply sucks her into oblivion. Luckily, when Zoya was a girl, she found a bottle of pills on a golf course. Oddly enough, these mystery pharmaceuticals had her name on it, and a voice told her that she was destined “to change the world” with them. If she takes one, it allows Lowe to go back one week in time. Every time her nose bleeds, signaling the end is nigh, she pops a pill. Every time she pops a pill, she wakes up back in the hospital, where she’s told she’s got a week to live. Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.
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If you’re saying to yourself, this premise sounds somewhat familiar, you’re not alone. Every film that leans heavily on temporal resets lives in the shadow of Groundhog Day, the 1993 hit that forced Bill Murray to relive a single day in perpetuity until he finally got it “right.” It’s arguably spawned more stylistic and thematic copycats than every modern movie except Pulp Fiction and Heat. Britto isn’t trying to avoid the comparison, throwing out montages of deserved déjà vu moments and endless variations on prepping for, say, the inevitable bird poop always hitting the same bench at the exact same second. Instead, he pivots to a mild sense of dread over knowing what’s coming yet being unable to alter anything. That Murray milestone in philosophically knotty comedies went for broad laughs and ultimately, romantic bliss. This goes for something closer to the Kübler-Ross model of nonstop grief over guffaws.

Even when Zoya finally experiences a slight difference in her seven-day rerun, in the form of Paula (The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri) — a science major at a community college who happens to be studying time, and happens to be working in a department overseen by Zoya’s old professor (veteran character actor Harris Yulin) from Princeton — she still finds herself battling the futility of it all. Granted, this terminally ill woman now tries to make every moment of her same ol’ week count more, running experiments with Paula on these magical pills and breaking the cycle in the name of a possible cure. Yet dead ends still greet her before she takes her dying breath one more time and pops yet another pill to stave off oblivion. Hope is lost, until Zoya starts to realize that maybe it’s not about getting better. Maybe it’s about making sure that your time counts, no matter how limited it is.
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On the page, this sounds corny. On screen, rendered with an oft-kilter wit, a lot of wonderful interplay between Parker and Edebiri, and a smattering of quirky touches (there’s a whole sub-subplot about a person shrunk to microscopic size who, because he’s such a “chill dude,” is happy to help them analyze the pills), Omni Loop distinguishes itself among its fellow mini-genre entries. Blessed with the presence of Parker, however, this interesting tweak on the question “What if you had a week to live forever?” becomes something extraordinarily emotionally resonant. There’s so much she does with stillness, or simply letting her expression go slack for a moment. Throwaway gestures or halting pauses suggest a lifetime of disappointment, or simply wishing that Lowe had taken so many roads less traveled. A sequence in which Zoya and her husband (Carlos Jacott) discuss a day in which she took their then-infant daughter to the beach becomes a short story unto itself, simply through how Parker expresses it like a sense memory.

There are so many little touches that Parker adds to this character, so many bits of acting in the present tense that don’t feel like acting at all, that it lifts this film up and imbues it with something unique: the feeling that you’re watching regret slowly transform itself into gratitude. The time loop concept is not an endgame, just a conduit to get to Parker doing what she does best. Theatergoers and TV viewers will recognize her skills at work here, and will likely see her Zoya in the context of Weeds‘ Nancy Botwin, Proof‘s mathematical genius and Angels in America‘s Harper Pitt. For those of us who hoped that Parker would eventually get the movie equivalent of those rich roles, this feels like more than just a modest work being graced with a great lead. It feels like a victory lap.