Synchronic was a bit of a surprise to me… I rented it on somewhat of a whim and discovered (to my surprise) that is stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan. This matters only because I thought it was a cryptic unknown indie film and winds up having a pretty good name brand cast (while still being a relatively low budget indie).

The film is about a couple of paramedics dealing with a new designer drug on the streets. A drug that results in weird wounds on its victims… or weird corpses. Turns out the drug messes with your perception of time… by which I mean <insert hand waving here> actually causes you to time travel.

Interesting idea and an interesting film. It’s not always successful but I think its intentions are good and it works hard to deliver a character-driven thoughtful science fiction time travel story. Unfortunately the character development doesn’t always work and the analytical side of my mind has a problem with literal time travel in the form of a pharmaceutical.

But that premise – if you ignore the hand waving – does give us some good ideas for a small time travel film. Namely that the past kind of sucks… not something we need to be taught, probably… but it sucks more if you have Anthony Mackie’s skin tone and you are traveling to the American South. Not entirely sure the race/racism issues are particularly well implemented into the theme of the film… it’s more window dressing and that’s not great.

But, overall, I’d say this is an interesting film that tries very hard. It might have needed a couple more passes on the script to iron out dialog or themes. But if you like time travel stories, this is a pretty decent one.

Score: 78