Thoughts on Omni Loop

     On Hulu, I watched the 2024 time-travel sci-fi drama Omni Loop, written and directed by Bernard Britto, and starring Mary-Louise Parker as Zoya Lowe, a quantum physics textbook author who was diagnosed with a growing black hole in her chest, and is given one week to live. She visits her mother in her assisted living community, spends time with her family at the beach, and gets an early celebration for her upcoming 55th birthday. But just as her nose begins to bleed, and Zoya knows this is the time of her death, she goes into the bathroom, takes a pill, and wakes up right back in the hospital a week ago, living the same week again in a self-induced time loop. She had found these pills when she was 12, in a bottle with her name on it, and would take them throughout her life to get ahead by going back in time to know how to improve things, but only started taking them again recently after her diagnosis.

    She is frustrated at living the same week over and over again, and decides to do research on the pills, and by chance, she meets Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a research assistant at a local community college, and they work together to do lab experiments on the pills, including using the help of a man who was shrunk to nanoscopic-size in a past experiment, who lives in a pet store box and helps with the calculations on the pills. They are trying to solve the mystery of time travel, but each time Zoya repeats the loop and they try different experiments, they are no closer to finding out how time travel works than before.

    It's an interesting movie that is about Zoya living alternate timelines each time she repeats the loop, as well as having anticipatory grieving for her own death within a week, and feeling like she was never good enough at her career no matter how many times she used the pills to her advantage to know answers in advance and get ahead. The film runs a lot longer than it should, at nearly two hours, when it feels like it should be 90 minutes, and can be a slog when going into Zoya's past history with her former colleague and ex Mark (Eddie Cahill). But Parker and Edebiri work really well together with great chemistry, as science professionals in very different positions in their life, and Paula talks about her past with her family and how she wishes she could have had the ability of time travel like Zoya did to fix past mistakes.

    I mainly watched this for the two leads and the time loop story, and while I felt it dragged at times, I thought it was a decent movie, focusing on women in STEM fields and trying to figure out time travel.