#synchronic 2019

[horrorpolls]

what's your favourite movie directed by aaron moorhead & justin benson?

resolution (2012)

spring (2014)

the endless (2017)

synchronic (2019)

something in the dirt (2022)

show results

Voting ended onJul 24, 2025

[firespirited]

The film of the day is Synchronic 2019 as it’s set in the sort of same universe as The Endless and it’s Anthony Mackie who is an incredible actor, don’t let his MCU appearances fool you. I’m not sure I can see him hurting in another piece of media for a long while after this and Altered Carbon S2. Phew.

Ok so a lot of the IMDB reviews complain about the film not being sci-fi horror enough and being too slow, too heavy on the drama and, again like for The Endless, they’re so wrong.

Character driven horror is a rarity and I cherish every story that puts in the effort to get us invested in the people before kicking off the “action”. I wish more stories would endeavour to make us care first instead of just exploring the cool concept and answering all the plot holes nitpicky folks are going to find not to mention the current obsession with outguessing the audiences expectations wrt to twists. Movies are stories not puzzles, I enjoy both but stories like this in the sci fi or horror genre shouldn't be so exceptional. It's grounding and makes it so much more real.

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I’m going to start with a rant: all time travel is space travel, by the time i’ve finished typing this we’ll have moved thousands of miles through space. You have to be magically tethered in some way to some spot on this fast travelling rotating rock or you would end up in the vacuum of space. All time travel stories require suspension of disbelief in logic as you know it and belief in concepts like quantum entanglement and objects & places being imbued with tethering properties... So wading through reviews is like watching folks fight over how magic healing crystals work. I love sci-fi but man alive, it attracts a certain demographic that is very annoying.

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Steve’s a paramedic in New Orleans, he works with his best friend, they’re starting to see some weird cases linked to a new designer drug, he finds out he has a GBM which is usually when I tap out of a movie and go cry my eyes out because fuck that cancer in particular [ ... ] He starts radiotherapy to increase his time then the friend’s daughter disappears after taking some of this drug. That’s when time travel comes in and we find out Steve loves physics and is definitely down to experiment in his time left.

This is where he gets to shine, the voice-over for his adventures is glib, relatable, smart and very funny.

He’s a black dude time travelling in New Orleans so he meets white dudes with guns who don’t like black folks three times which is wild and 1/ kind of iffy for white writers to be putting him through, 2/ New Orleans has an interesting history of being more permissive about black people than elsewhere in the USA, he didn’t have to have a bad time all the time.

While we get to know him well, there’s clearly some underlying serious PTSD here that’s going unexplored, the man is self-medicating and half numb.

The end is left ambiguous but the writers throwing in a line about the radiotherapy going surprisingly well was not fair, it turns him into a saviour instead of a man choosing between two types of death. He deserved more time: more screen time, more time not being a hero, I needed the tree outside his house to be engraved with “I found the one”. He did some magic time travel and had a magic brain - I need him to be his own great great granddad.

7/10 - needed a black writer in the room & more time spent on Steve. Very compelling sci-fi. I love the small interpersonal scale of these stories far more than earth-shattering events or galactic wars and plan to visit more of the Moorhead and Benson work. The cinematography was gorgeous and unsettling. It would have been terrific with better music: something edgier or tied to Steve himself (think the Piaf piece that gets slowed down in Inception - haven’t seen that yet either btw)

[topherfoxtrot]

Synchronic (2019) dir.: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

[vena-amoris-darkness]

[topherfoxtrot]

Anthony Mackie time traveling in Synchronic (2019)