Perhaps it’s the general obsession with optimising every aspect of life that’s driven the glut of time-loop thrillers in recent years, with the likes of Predestination, Looper and Edge of Tomorrow et al. The McManus brothers’ Redux Redux is a decently handled example from the low-budget end. It traps a bereaved mother and a bratty tearaway in a Sisyphean revenge cycle, playing like an intimate version of Terminator where the credibility of 12-step grief recovery, rather than the future of humanity, is what’s at stake.
Actually, Redux Redux is technically a multiverse film. Hailing from the only universe where multiverse travel has become possible, Irene (played by the directors’ sister Michaela McManus) uses what looks like a banged-up gas boiler to skip between different timelines. But there is one constant: she always ends up murdering Neville (Jeremy Holm), the short-order cook and child-killer who abducted her daughter. She hopes to find the one multiverse where her daughter is still alive. Instead, on her umpteenth payback, she interrupts Neville with 15-year-old Mia (Stella Marcus) cable-tied in his backroom.
The loop functions nicely as a metaphor for the repetition-compulsion of trauma, with Irene locked into hatred, and her new ward showing unsettling enthusiasm for their business. Despite the temporal trimmings and some early jinks with the fellow grief survivor Jonathan (Jim Cummings) Irene serially picks up, the McManuses settle into a linear affair that doesn’t overly dally with the kinks and paradoxes of time/multiverse travel. It’s essentially centred on Mia’s attempts to give Irene the slip, as well as fleshing out (arguably not enough) the “underground railway” infrastructure for multiverse travel.
The upside of this straightforwardness is a certain fleet-footed confidence as the McManuses imbue the road runs and shootouts, echoing through eternity, with a Christopher Nolan-esque inexorability. But if it has the style, the substance isn’t fully present until the closing act, which finally starts to make the timeline convolutions collide fully with the protagonist’s broken psyche. If it’s not quite devious enough overall, Redux Redux still opens up a punchy murder-revenge side alley for the genre.
• Redux Redux is on digital platforms from 23 February.
