Aporia, 2023.
Written and Directed by Jared Moshe.
Starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman, Whitney Morgan Cox, Rachel Paulson, Lisa Linke, Adam O’Byrne, Dionne Audain, Veda Cienfuegos, Mann Alfonso, Grace Hinson, Jeffrey Sun, Elohim Nycalove, and Coel Mahal.
SYNOPSIS:
Since losing her husband, Sophie has struggled to manage grief, a full-time job, and parenting her devastated daughter, but when a former physicist reveals a secret time-bending machine, Sophie will be faced with an impossible choice.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Aporia wouldn’t exist.
For eight months, Sophie (Judy Greer) has grieved the tragic loss of her husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) at the hands of a drunk driver (Adam O’Byrne) and drifted apart from her daughter Riley (Faithe Herman). That is until Mal’s physicist best friend Jabir (Payman Maadi), who has spent those eight months doing his best to console her, unveils he has put the finishing touches on a time machine that the two of them had been working on in his home. However, in writer/director Jared Moshe’s Aporia, it’s not a traditional time machine, per se. It’s more of a particle machine that can alter time by way of transmitting an energy blast into someone’s skull, killing them and subsequently changing the course of history.
Sophie is desperate, so she doesn’t have to weigh the morality behind her actions for too long before committing to using the machine on the drunk driver in the past to bring back her husband, who happens to be someone she knows and an alcoholic consistently making life hell for his wife Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) and daughter Aggie (Veda Cienfuegos.) It seems that she can fix more than her own life by taking another one. Anyone who has ever seen a time travel movie is familiar with the butterfly effect, aware that everything will not turn out how these characters want. One wishes these characters were smart enough to realize that, but there is also some dark entertainment coming from the ways playing God consistently comes back to bite them in the ass.
What’s frustrating, though, is an early compelling dramatic stretch of Aporia where Sophie realizes that Kara is now bankrupt, has had to sell off her bakery, and is still under a mountain of debt pertaining to medical visits for her daughter and becomes the consoler in this dynamic is wasted in favor of watching her, her husband, and Jabir contemplate what other good they can do with this machine and further messing around with time. The most crushing bit of news, though, is learning that her husband never became an alcoholic in this timeline. There is a strong level of guilt placed upon Sophie being in the reverse of this situation that would have made for a riveting movie by itself.
Instead, Aporia twists itself into a series of Sophie’s choices, some of which are engaging in their morality play staging, and others where the screenplay feels like it’s spinning itself in circles to find more material without realizing that dealing with the consequences of using the machine once makes for more than enough powerful human drama. The changes to the timeline are consistently thrilling as they reveal themselves (including a particular one that wildly changes the family dynamic), but there are also diminishing returns to the narrative as a whole. Several of the performances are either off or overacted, although the rules and refreshing concept of this method for altering time are enough to hold interest.
Aporia also doesn’t have much of a grand emotional payoff. It builds toward using the machine one final time to make some serious changes, closing out with an unsatisfying ambiguous ending, specifically because there isn’t much attachment to any of these characters beyond watching and laughing at how to continue to screw things up. Jared Moshe regularly comes across intriguing aspects of the film worth leaning into more, whether it be drama or black comedy, but doesn’t seem to have a clear handle on what tone he should take.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
