Synchronic

I was really intrigued by the premise of the movie Synchronic so I decided to see it last night and it is so much more than I thought it would be.  Dennis (Jamie Dornan) and Steve (Anthony Mackie) are long time friends and paramedics in New Orleans who are called to a series of unusual cases where victims have unexplained injuries, including a man who has been stabbed by an ancient sword and a woman who has been bitten by an exotic snake that is nowhere to be found.  As they investigate these strange occurrences, we learn that Dennis has a troubled teenage daughter named Brianna (Ally Ioannides) and a marriage that is deteriorating while Steve is a hard-drinking womanizer who can't commit to anyone because of a tragedy during Hurricane Katrina.  They eventually learn that the victims have been taking a designer drug called Synchronic which transports them to another time period in the same geographic location.  When they are called to another case involving the drug, they learn that Brianna has taken it and disappeared.  Steve is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given a short time to live so he makes the decision to take Synchronic so he can find Brianna.  The story is interesting and there are some really trippy images but I particularly enjoyed the philosophical exploration of time, relativity, perception, and fate.  There is an absolutely brilliant discussion between the two characters about their perceptions of time based on their experiences and why it is more interesting to live in the present, which is filled with variables, and not fear the end of your life, which is not.  I loved the description of time as a record album.  The needle is dropped in one groove which represents one point in time while all the other points in time still exist simultaneously in the other grooves.  I found this fascinating.  I also found the subtle commentary on race to be interesting because Steve runs afoul of the Ku Klux Klan when he is transported to a Depression-era homestead and is mistaken for a slave during a Civil War battle, which is to be expected, but he is also mistaken for a criminal by the police at a crime scene in the present.  Both Dornan and Mackie give riveting performances but I was especially impressed with Steve's character arc as a bitter man obsessed with death who learns the value of life.  This is an incredibly thought-provoking movie that is more than just a sci-fi thriller and I highly recommend it.