Synchronic Review: The Trouble with Time Travel & Appreciating the Now

I don’t know about you, but as a history buff and general rubbernecker of the past, I find myself wishing I could time travel quite a bit. And as wistful as I get about certain eras or decades, I’m also practical enough to know how much it would suck to have actually lived in the majority of the past. Terrible diseases, awful sexism, extra violent racism, and I mean gee, most of all, have you guys ever seen what the sanitary pad situation was like even within the last fifty years? No thanks. 

But I digress–junkies and young people being found gruesomely murdered, that’s what we were talking about, right? Out today, Synchronic (2020) is the latest offering from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who you might recognize from previous horror films The Endless (2017) and Spring (2014) (which we previously appreciated over here on Back Row). Their latest takes familiar elements from each to build an entirely new story that focuses on drug addiction, sudden death, the harsh realities of the past, and unintentional time travel.

Steve (Anthony Mackie) is a New Orleans-based paramedic who, together with his partner Dennis (Jamie Dornan), has recently come upon a series of bizarre and gruesome accidents happening in conjunction with overdose patients. One woman is found in a suburban hotel bed with a massive snake bite, the likes of which could only be found on a different continent. A man is found in a junkie house with a machete wound that cut completely through his torso. They don’t think too much of it until Dennis’ teen daughter suddenly goes missing from a house party–the last thing she was seen doing was taking an off-brand of ayahuasca. Running on a hunch and a drugstore wrapper, Steve soon tracks down the culprit as a head shop designer drug called Synchronic. He quickly learns that what this drug actually does is transport whoever takes it through time for seven minutes–or maybe forever, depending on how young you are.

Synchronic a little bit horror, a lot of bit sci-fi and genuinely an intriguing enough concept that you can overlook some its more phoned-in aspects. Namely its first hour, which focuses mostly on these dismembered and maimed corpses rolled out in juxtaposition with Steve learning he has six months left to live because of a tumor on his pineal gland. Considering there’s not much else to Steve, besides the fact that he and his buddy Dennis are the most casual paramedics I’ve ever seen stroll up somebody actively bleeding out on the floor, the first half of the film feels mostly like an excuse to get in some gore-tastic special effects. Don’t get me wrong, they’re creepy enough, but when the film finally gets into the actual experience of time travel you wonder why we wasted so much time on crime scenes.

The way the Synchronic drug works is that it will transport you to whatever spot correlates through time with where you are when you take it. The drug’s maker describes it as a needle on a record player being dropped at random–a nice visual but certainly one that just opens up more questions if you think too hard about it. But I’m not the type of viewer who wants or needs a full PowerPoint presentation on how the ‘magic’ works, and once Steve realizes he can use his brain tumor to his advantage, taking multiple test missions with the drug (and his poor dog) to see how it works, the movie gets really fun. Steve quickly realizes that the past mostly sucks and it’s chock full of ways to get killed; he almost freezes to death on a prehistoric tundra, almost gets speared to death by an inquisition-era knight, narrowly dodges being sacrificed by a tribe of excited natives, and is forced to run for his life from the KKK in some backwater Southern hick town. Seeing as there’s no correlation between the present day place and the past time, you’d think there’d be one trip to the past in which he just ends up in a nice field or a mid-sized city street or the middle of the ocean, but c’est la vie.

Synchronic does offer some thoughtful moments that touch upon some current earthly ills, such as the casual cruelty towards drug addiction. As people start dying around town, both the cops and the paramedics dismiss these bizarre deaths as weird ‘drug stuff’–their lives are treated as being largely disposable, as if their violent deaths were of their own volition. It’s only after Dennis’ teen daughter goes missing that Steve jars awake from his depression haze, and gets angry enough to track down the drug distributor in an attempt to buy them out and put an end to it. In a delightfully satisfying scene he berates the young woman behind the counter, who is completely baffled if not a little hurt over his accusations that she’s perpetuating death and mayhem across town by selling this designer drug. Well, she is! Anybody actively looking the other way is.

The movie also makes a point to dissect the nature of sudden and violent death in a way most films in its genre and budget tend to gloss over. There’s a moment towards the end of the film where Steve muses to Dennis over the marvel of life and death, stating that while the vast majority of people typically die in a bed somewhere, the people that they see as paramedics on a day to day basis are the exceptions. The randomness of the universe is a hard truth to face, especially when you’re exposed to overwhelmingly horrible deaths day in and day out. Steve’s almost onto something when he gets undercut by the script’s laughably stoner conclusion: with tears in his eyes he proclaims “the present is a miracle, bro.” Alright, bro, I guess. It’s a simple conclusion that’s admittedly been on my mind as we all do our best not to let the chaotic randomness of this year overwhelm us. I’m not dissing on Anthony Mackie though, the casual depressive funk Steve wanders around in is easily the most enjoyable part of the entire film.

While you wish it scratched the surface a bit more than it does, Synchronic is easy to enjoy as a gory and just intellectually stimulating enough watch. I’d even go as far as to say it’s one of the better sci-fi offerings we’ve had in the last few years.

Synchronic is out now in theaters (but its directors want you to avoid seeing it there).