If only you’d moved to another city, gone to another school, or taken another job, things would be different. This is the fantasy peddled by multiverse narratives. It’s an optimistic expression of malleable fate—that a few small changes may dramatically alter an entire life. With Redux Redux, though, the filmmaking duo known as the McManus Brothers come at the concept from the opposite direction, focusing on a demoralizing lack of change.
As Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) travels between alternate universes in a rickety-looking, refrigerator-sized contraption that she must lie in like a coffin, she encounters only minor differences between the realms. She’s pretty much given up hope of finding her murdered daughter alive, but she does know that she’ll find the killer, Neville (Jeremy Holm). Across the universes, he works in the same diner, lives in the same house, and keeps the same strand of the dead girl’s hair in the same box along with the same trophies from his other victims.
It’s a concept that’s bracing in its pessimism, at least for a spell. As Irene prepares to take some measure of satisfaction from the revenge she’s enacted hundreds of times before, a wrench is thrown into her mission: Rather than finding Neville alone, she stumbles upon Mia (Stella Marcus), the girl intended to be his next victim, and frees her. Neville escapes in the confusion, and as Irene and Mia pursue him, Redux Redux turns into a low-budget echo of James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with the steely, single-minded Mia as the Sarah Connor to Marcus’s older, somewhat more irritating take on snarky John Connor.
Beyond quick flashbacks to Irene’s past executions of Neville, the film is visually unremarkable. And while the script is tailored toward letting the characters clumsily express their feelings and intentions aloud, it never quite plumbs the darker depths of its premise; Irene’s gung-ho approach to multiverse-hopping goes largely unexplored beyond Mia likening Irene’s Terminator-esque tendency to open fire in public to playing Grand Theft Auto. Graphic though the violence often is, it’s never allowed to be as horrifying as it could be.
But the concept takes the film a long way, and at a respectable clip, with the McManus Brothers’s script never getting bogged down in the specifics of alternate-universe travel. One scene even turns what might have been straightforward exposition into a tense standoff, as Irene and Mia face down a pair of multiversal smugglers who operate out of the classified ads. Easy as it may be to imagine a more artful, restrained, and introspective version of Redux Redux, the one we got is satisfying enough that you may want to take it out for another spin.
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