Redux Redux

Bluesky

The 2020 film festival season was understandably quieter than usual, and although Fantasia put on a good showing, it didn’t make the impact that it would in a normal year. For this reason, Kevin and Matthew McManus’ inventive and skillfully shot The Block Island Sound didn’t generate quite as much buzz as it deserved, but some films can’t be kept down, and it went on to enjoy a lengthy run on Netflix. Now the brothers have launched their second feature, this time at South By Southwest, and demonstrated that they can live up to the promise of that first work.

Redux Redux is structured around a simpler idea and develops in a more straightforward way, but it’s handled with real confidence. Every year produces a fresh crop of indie science fiction films which strive to make a big impression on a small budget, and this is one of few that can really compete with the studio blockbusters, largely thanks to great casting and s strong action sensibility. There’s no need to dazzle us with fantastical settings or props when we’re caught up in the moment, and from the opening sequence in which we see a woman standing by what appears to be a campfire only for the camera to pan down and reveal a man tied to a chair burning to death, the McManus brothers have our attention.

The woman is Irene (Michaela McManus). She has killed this man before and she will kill him again. The film wastes little time in establishing a few basic facts. Irene had a daughter, 13-year-old Anna. The man (Jeremy Holm) killed Anna. Now Irene travels between parallel universes, desperately hoping to find one in which her daughter is alive. Failing to do so, she takes the next best option: she gets revenge. She’s a smart, tough, capable woman, and yet she knows that she’s in trouble. Driven by a remorseless instinct to save her child, she can’t stop.

It’s refreshing to encounter a multiverse film that doesn’t mess about. Redux Redux contains no tedious philosophising about the nature of time, no angst at the prospect of interfering in something set by fate. There is no fate here and there might as well be no past. Irene can’t imagine much of a future; she is trapped in an endless present. Her technology is distinctly retro, a battered machine whose origins, and what they imply, are equally intriguing. Her only source of comfort is a series of encounters with the same man (sweetly played by Jim Cummings), who perceives them as one night stands, having no idea that she keeps on going back to him. But everything changes when one day, tracking down her enemy in his lair, she finds a teenage girl tied up there. This is not Anna but Mia (Stella Marcus), a spiky runaway, and when Mia realises what Irene is doing, she wants in.

A great dynamic between the two women lends a fresh edge to the action and puts us in the unusual position of watching a buddy movie where both parties are wary of getting too close. The complexity of navigating a relationship like this in the shadow of Irene’s bereavement is intelligently handled, though the film never gives either of them much in the way of quiet time to reflect. Mia is by no means Irene’s equal as a fighter, but she’s a street smart kid with a few tricks up her sleeve and she’s absolutely ruthless in pursuing what she wants, having always had to rely on herself. Of course, their quarry is not completely helpless, and there are cops and other, less commonplace threats to deal with, so there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong despite this.

With some great set pieces and character moments, Redux Redux is a consistently entertaining science fiction thriller which, if there’s any justice left in the world, will see the McManus brothers get the chance to work on something much bigger next time around.