APORIA (Fantasia Fest 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Finding her life ripped apart when her beloved husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) is killed by a drunk-driver, Sophie (Judy Greer) plummets to depths she once would have found incomprehensible as she struggles to deal with her own grief and that of her troubled teenage daughter Riley (Faith Herman). With only her late husband’s best friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) for support, the ex physicist and current Uber driver reveals to her his secret project: he has invented a time machine of sorts that, while unable to send a person back through time, is powerful enough to send a bullet back to kill a specific target. Faced with the moral decision of whether killing the man who killed her husband and thus allowing the latter to survive, when Sophie and Jabir put their plan into action they realize things are ethically far more complex than they ever could have imagined.
With its recent world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest, Aporia is based on a very neat conceptual premise that provides a refreshingly morbid take on the traditional time travel film. Writer-director Jared Moshe has tantalizingly described it as “a time travel movie that never goes back in time”, an effective hook for an indie scifi film that uses its budgetary limitations as a way to spark a genuinely fresh creative vision.
Amongst Aporia’s impressive credits we find executive producer David Lawson who, with Rustic Films, has been a key player in the always-fascinating films of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Their work feels of note here; not only do they similarly work in time travel and dimension hopping spaces as seen in their hugely successful films like The Endless (2017) and Synchronic (2019), with Lawson they have made low-budget high concept scifi films something of a calling card.
In this sense, Aporia doesn’t satisfy in quite the same way as the films of Benson and Moorhead, but in its defence it seems less conceptually ambitious when it comes to the thematic core of what it is Moshe is trying to do here. Rather, Aporia functions most compellingly as a kind of ethical family melodrama with a scifi twist, focusing the bulk of its attention on precisely how lives are impacted as a result of the tinkering with time that lies at the heart of its scifi premise. Aporia is a family melodrama with a scifi edge rather than vice versa, but if you are open to the bringing of these two generic strands together it is a satisfying watch.
NOTE: Without actors and writers, we wouldn’t have movies. This review was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, and the author of this review supports them unequivocally.
