Synchronic (2020)

Synchronic arrives with the somber bearing of a film that knows it is about something, though it declines to say precisely what. Two New Orleans paramedics, played by Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, spend their shifts pulling corpses from the wreckage of a designer drug that bends time. The premise is elegant. The execution is moody, patient, and occasionally stoned on its own atmosphere. Mackie anchors the thing as a Black lead in a genre picture that never pauses to announce the significance of that fact, which is either a quiet virtue or an oversight, depending on the appetite of the viewer. The supporting cast is varied and unremarked upon. Katie Aselton and Alexia Ioannides occupy the female roles without the film building any gendered argument around them.

Where the film does engage the culture is in its use of history. Steve, dying of a tumor in his pineal gland, travels backward into Louisiana's past and finds the Ku Klux Klan waiting, along with a looter who mistakes him for a runaway slave during the Battle of New Orleans. These are not decorative set pieces. The film understands that a Black man moving through the American South's timeline is a different proposition than a white one, and it lets that understanding sit in the frame without a lecture attached. The conquistador era and the 1920s get the same treatment: destinations first, commentary second. History here is a landscape to be survived, not reinterpreted.

The absences are as telling as the presences. No queer characters, no climate anxiety, no indictment of the pharmaceutical economy behind the drug, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority. The film is a genre machine that shows instead of tells, and it mostly resists the urge to sermonize. The end product is a somber, well-acted piece of temporal dread that unsettles instead of instructing. Refreshing, in its way.