[TIFF 2019 Review] Synchronic Continues Moorhead & Benson's Meteoric Rise

“A Moorhead & Benson Film,” the opening credits boast and it immediately brought a smile to my face. Now four films deep, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have made a career of marrying high-concept and trippy science fiction with grounded human emotions. Friends dealing with addiction. Love in the face of impossibility. People forced to relive their past mistakes. All wrapped up in a bow of special effects and inventive camera work that punches above their budgets.   

So, it’s only appropriate that a movie called Synchronic would continue the trend. Like the concept the film is named for, it’s no coincidence that Synchronic is about…well, simultaneous coincidences.  

It opens in a blood-spattered ambulance, as two paramedics named Dennis (Jamie Dornan) and Steve (Anthony Mackie) rush to save an unseen man’s life. Steve is nursing a killer tequila headache. He’s fine, if you ask him. But Dennis eyes him warily. It’s a look that speaks to their shared history. The two are best friends and their friendship feels real and lived in. Dennis is married to a woman named Tara (Katie Aselton) and together they have an eighteen-year-old daughter named Brianna (Ally Ioannides) and a newborn.  

Steve, meanwhile, is all about the single and mingle. His nights are filled with alcohol and one-night stands; his mornings with awkward conversations with the women he brings home. He’s an armchair physicist who can quote Einstein’s letter to Michele Besso’s family after his passing; “…the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one,” the letter reads, in part.  

And it’s the persistent illusion of time that feels completely apt and a perfect entry point into the world of Synchronic.  

The pair work in a world of almost-lost causes. Drug overdoses. Stabbings. Murders. They’ve seen humanity at its most desperate and that knowledge obviously weighs heavily on them. One night, they take a call to a very peculiar crime scene where a young woman has overdosed and her apparent father lies bleeding in the adjoining room. They set to fixing the people with workmanlike precision, ignoring, for the time being, the oddity of the scene. The stabbed man, for instance, has a wound with a clean entrance and exit wound, caused by an ancient and weirdly distorted sword they find jammed into the wall. Concentric circles are hand-drawn on the wall, capturing Steve’s attention.  

But it’s the empty pouch next to the body with the word “Synchronic” emblazoned on it that starts a chain reaction of coincidences and oddities. Synchronic is a new designer drug that starts to show up at more crime scenes that become weirder and weirder. I’m talking about a body-shaped pile of ash that one police officer says is like the victim spontaneously combusted. Or a woman bitten by a snake…on the second floor of a hotel, sans snake.

Meanwhile, the duo are dealing with their own imploding worlds that make them just as almost-lost as the people they’re trying to fix. Steve discovers very quickly in the first act that he has an inoperable tumor and a variably small lifespan. After a lifetime filled with casual flings and over-indulgence, the reality of his situation stops him cold.  

Dennis, meanwhile, might seem like the most put together of the two, with a beautiful family and a fantastic relationship with his college-bound daughter. But the family man is struggling at home and his carefully created façade crumbles as the horror hits (semi-predictably) close to home when Brianna vanishes after taking Synchronic at a frat party.

Her disappearance fractures Dennis’s relationship with his wife, the latter of which starts to isolate herself from him and the world. “She knows me better than anyone and she hates me,” Dennis tells Steve at one point.

After this propulsive first act, Justin Benson’s script slows the pacing and puts the focus squarely on Steve, who might be the only person capable of finding Brianna. It’s a very heavy movie, but Anthony Mackie, as always, rises to the challenge and balances the drama with bouts of humor and levity. Even before his diagnosis, Mackie imbues Steve with a kind of melancholia. While he’s great at his job, there’s apathy in the way he tackles it. He ignores the crippling loneliness by filling his nights with casual flings and alcohol.

Mackie balances the competing tones perfectly, but it’s actually Jamie Dornan that surprised me. He’s always seemed a bit…wooden to me. An incredibly handsome mannequin with not much going on under that perfect face and his roles have never really asked for much more than that. So, the performance that Benson and Moorhead are able to pull from him is amazing. Dornan’s anguish after his daughter’s disappearance starts as a quiet desperation and slowly grows into a performance that is raw and painful. “Tara…I really fucking need you,” he cries, getting choked up; it’s a moment that made me want to reevaluate him as an actor.  

Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s films have always felt intimate, often focused on a single location or small set of locations. And it’s this history that makes Synchronic feel so big and epic. Once the truth of Synchronic is revealed, it frees them to really go for broke with some stunning set pieces, including a fantastically staged war zone sequence. Meanwhile, Moorhead has upped his cinematography game and after a wonderful tracking shot introduces the first crime scene, he goes for broke. One particular awe-inspiring shot involves the camera panning upward to the sky, literally turning Dennis’s world upside down as he discovers his daughter is missing.

So, yes. Synchronic is filled with all of the sci-fi and horror trappings you’d expect from a Moorhead and Benson film. But it's the intimate moments paired with the infinity of the omnipresent universe hanging over them that really hit home. The never-changing night sky that hangs over an impermanent world, constantly in motion and churning from ice to swamps to forests to cities.

Steve’s journey takes him through moments of levity, heartbreak, horror and incredulity, but the universe watches with an apathetic eye. It’s up to him and Dennis to find their own meaning. Similarly, it’s up to the audience to do its own unpacking of its themes and motifs. But it rewards those not just looking for sci-fi extravaganza.

Fans of the Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s work will absolutely love this film. But more importantly, it continues their progression as the directors to watch. They pull off such magic tricks with such limited resources and it’s time to give them a larger one. High-concept sci-fi that’s artful and commercially entertaining doesn’t come around often. Come for the spectacle, stay for the meditation of our very existence.

Synchronic is a stunning piece of science fiction with a heart beating just under the surface.