Synchronic is a science fiction cosmic horror drama directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson and starring Anthony Mackie.
Paramedics Steve Danube (Mackie) and Dennis Donnally (Jamie Dornan) have seen some pretty horrifying things on the job, but recently they've been seeing cases with bizarre, unexplainable deaths, all of which are connected to a new designer drug, Synchronic. However, after Dennis's daughter goes missing during one of these cases, Steve investigates and discovers that Synchronic is far more than a mere drug - and challenges his view in reality itself.
List of tropes applying to this film:
- Achievements in Ignorance: Dr. Kermani was just trying to make a designer drug, but wound up basically inventing a time machine completely by accident.
- Always Save the Girl: Knowing the risk and also his fatal condition, Steve spends the third act trying to locate the missing daughter of his friend and jump back in time to bring her back.
- Ambiguous Ending: Dennis takes the hand of Steve, who is fading in and out of reality. The credits roll before we find out if this hard contact with the present will pull Steve back into the present, or if he will remain stuck in the past.
- The Atoner: Dr. Kermani, the creator of Synchronic, deeply regrets making the drug and the lives lost as a result, and is trying to destroy every last sample of it.
- Bittersweet Ending: Steve reconciles with Dennis and saves his daughter, but he may be trapped in the past in the process, and he is dying of a brain tumor anyway.
- Continuity Nod: During Steve's encounter with the voodoo cult, the staff the priest holds is almost identical with the signature pillars from The Endless.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: One of the victims of Synchronic dies by an accident, when the drug kicks in inside a highrise. Since there is no building in the past, the poor schmuck hits the ground after falling down, then the dead body syncs back into present with utterly impossible wounds.
- Deadpan Snarker: Steve is pretty snarky, always ready with some sort of barb.
- Diabolus ex Nihilo: Right when Brianna and Steve are about to travel back to the present, a looter holds them up and, mistaking Steve for a slave, tries to steal him and kill Brianna.
- Doomed Protagonist: Steve, thanks to his brain tumor.
- Driven to Suicide: A report over the radio reveals Dr. Kermani killed himself.
- Dull Surprise: Steve is disturbingly stoic about the fact he figured out a reliable way for time travel.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: It seems that no matter what, whoever takes Synchronic, they always land into some hairy situation, with hostile people or wildlife around, or outright suffer from a Tele-Frag. Even seemingly peaceful places are lethal by mere exposure, like landing in the middle of a blizzard somewhere during the Ice Age.
- Gorn: The looter being blown apart by an artillery shell.
- Lovecraft Lite: The film toys a lot with existentialist dread and the nature of reality, but ultimately takes the slightly more idealistic approach that your connections with other people is all that really matters, and the characters manage to earn a Bittersweet Ending.
- Not What It Looks Like: Two paramedics arrive to a 911 call and find a man with a truly gruesome slash and stab wounds, while everyone else in the house is high and unresponsive. They assume drug bust and call police to the site. The man get attacked with a sabre in the past.
- Our Time Travel Is Different: The in-universe time is not linear or circular, but everything is happening all at once. Synchronic allows to change your perception of the time continuum itself, and thus works as a highly unstable and unpredictable form of time travel. On top of that, you always shift to the exact same location in spacenote , just the time changes, so hopefully, you are at the ground level or just above it, or else...
- Power at a Price: Despite being an adult, Steve has a still non-calcified pineal gland and thus is receptive to Synchronic. That's because he has an inoperable brain tumor.
- Professor Guinea Pig: Steve experiments on himself to figure out the exact logic behind what Synchronic does. He quickly starts packing for the travel after a handful of nasty encounters with and in the past.
- Secretly Dying: Steve keeps the fact that he's dying of a brain tumor under wraps for a while.
- Sophisticated as Hell: Steve monologues after meeting a caveman while time traveling.Steve: And in that moment, seeing what years of barely surviving is like, this man, probably ten years younger than me but looking older despite his paleo diet, that I realized… The past fucking sucks, man!
