In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) vaults through an endless sequence of parallel realities, searching for a universe where her teenage daughter was not the victim of a local serial killer. When we’re introduced to this grieving mother, she has already exacted her vengeance on the perpetrator — a fry-cook named Neville (Jeremy Holm) by day — more times than she can count, with each gory recompense taking with it another chunk of her winnowing humanity. By this point, Irene has realized that her interdimensional travels are in vain, but she can’t seem to break this violent cycle.
Enter Mia (Stella Marcus), a wayward girl who crosses paths with Irene in Neville’s lair. The strong-willed runaway instantly tips the film in a more conventional direction, giving Irene a sense of surrogate purpose, as well as someone to save. They bicker, part ways, and reunite on ostensibly begrudging terms, but at no point does the nature of their relationship seem volatile or unfamiliar. The brooding, sullen tone of Irene’s initial sci-fi-tinged spiral teases an arrestingly downbeat revenge fable, but the McManuses saddle their story with that most dishonest of film tropes: the precocious teen.
Irene’s efforts to shelter Mia from a violent world predictably backfire, and the two become stranded in another universe when Irene’s high-tech transport chamber breaks down. The world of the film opens up, slightly, when they make contact with black market travel agents from Irene’s home world, “001” — the only universe to discover and capitalize on this mode of travel. The deal goes sour when the sinister sellers try to make off with Irene’s superior machine, and Mia finally proves her worth in a tight spot, losing a bit of her innocence in the process. Her experiences motivate the story’s expanding perspective, but her blatantly telegraphed dramatic function reduces the narrative’s circuitous pathways to variations on the same redundant clause.
Redux Redux combines tropes willfully, but not strategically. Its scrappy combination of the burnt-out multiverse trend and the time-loop structure of a film like Groundhog Day is emblematic of its generic and dramatic shortcomings; not only does it render the screenplay’s pseudoscience muddled and contradictory — Mia learned about multiverse theory in a creative writing class, after all — it also limits the film’s grim preoccupations with grief and guilt into the confines of borrowed frameworks. There are flashes of ingenuity throughout, but they are assimilated into a narrative that, like its protagonist, only has one place to go. Short of thrills, surprises, or any novel psychological textures, Redux Redux has little to do but schlep along as well as it can on an empty fuel tank.
Published as part of Overlook Film Fest 2025.
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