It feels like every movie I’ve seen at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival turns into an instant favorite, from A Grand Mockery, a hypnotic Super 8mm avant-garde trip from Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs, to Anything That Moves, an inventively transgressive Giallo/Bomba picture courtesy of Alex Phillips. Every strange, horny, and revolting piece of genre cinema the festival has to offer I consumed with an excessive enthusiasm and greedy attention, like it’s my first time discovering the marvels of moviemaking. But out of this edition’s rich trove of sleeper hits, a low-budget multiverse thriller by the name of Redux Redux, the third feature from brothers Kevin and Matthew McManus, might just shoot to the top of my Fantasia list.
The narrative concerns the aggrieved Irene Kelly, played by Michaela McManus (sister to the directing duo), blasting into the multiverse to hunt down the serial killer Neville (Jeremy Holm), who is responsible for her daughter’s death. She has killed every iteration of him countless times before, whether in his apartment or in the diner where he works as a cook or waitstaff, depending on the realm he’s in. Thursdays usually work best for her, as he gets paid on that day, and she needs the money to subsist. Via a rusty machine she acquired from the black market, she jumps from one parallel universe to the next, eager to make the murderer’s life just as miserable as hers. Despite all the madness, Irene can’t put herself to stop. It isn’t that the adrenaline of the killing streak thrills her — if anything, she’s nowhere near any sort of catharsis — it’s more to do with the fact that whether or not the man gets killed, ends up in prison, or walks away scot-free, her daughter remains dead, and she keeps wondering if there’s a dimension where Anna (Grace Van Dien) actually lives the life so brutally stolen from her in several parallel dimensions.
Whereas blockbuster sci-fi movies largely lean on how an actual or imagined science orients a particular world, Redux Redux is far more subtle in its sci-fi component. Often relying on wide framing, courtesy of cinematographer Alan Gwizdowski, including an opening composition which calls to mind the money shot of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), and a kinetic synth soundscape, the film’s many iterations of the multiverse still boast recognizable worlds, featuring modest changes in locations, like the black market signposts where Irene purchases gear for her time-bending machine, or character details, as in the case of Irene’s ex-lover, Jonathan (the lovely Jim Cummings), who may or may not have quit smoking.
The story unfolds in medias res, and the McManus siblings’ choice to refuse the viewer any access to the protagonist’s life prior to the bloodlust or how she comes across the mystical flux capacitor may well be seen as narrative limitations, but it also allows us to draw our focus to the central grief drama, which unravels further when Irene travels to another timeline and encounters Mia (a charmingly annoying Stella Marcus), a runaway teenager who is about to be Neville’s latest victim. The orphan insists on tagging along with her, but she is adamant on continuing her soul-consuming quest alone. She says it’s no place for such a young life. Mia reckons otherwise. Soon, Irene caves in, briefly turning Redux Redux into a road movie.
Playing foil to Irene, Mia doubles as a surrogate for the former’s daughter. The young character is also a surrogate for the backstory that the directors opt to eschew in their script, showing us glimpses of who Irene was as a mother before all this commitment to vengeance and search for closure. Their time together, which includes a thrilling physical altercation between them and a pair of black market cons (played by Michael Manuel and Taylor Misiak), forces our protagonist to rethink if the sense of justice afforded to her by the technology still actually means something. As Irene, McManus turns in a performance that first feels muscular and imposing, but slowly shifts into an intimate register revealing a reality that’s beginning to come apart at the seams.
Pain and trauma frequently recurs in Redux Redux just as time loops in on itself. It suggests that the operations of grief do not follow a linear logic but rather a series of rewinds in which healing moves in increments. The movie’s primary draw is that it is able to make us believe in the workings of its multiversal world, despite its modest, low-budget sci-fi execution. In this sense, the picture’s vision is particularly potent and refreshingly unexpected.
Redux Redux recently played at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the official Fantasia site for the title.
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