Synchronic
Best friends Dennis Dannelly and Steve Danube are paramedics, riding the back of the ambulance as they are called to emergencies around New Orleans, the latest a slumtown drug den where the bodies are just laid there, one having overdosed, the other having been stabbed clean through by an antique blade, pumping blood onto the floor through the bandages Dennis is pressing onto the wound.
Another day, another tragedy, a burns victim in a derelict amusement park, beside the charred remains which have no hope of revival a torn wrapper with a logo and a single word, Synchronic, then a woman who insists she was bitten by a snake despite the evidence indicating otherwise, her boyfriend dead at the bottom of an empty lift shaft, and in the hotel bedroom a black wrapper marked Synchronic.
Law enforcement dismissive of the insight of a mere medic, Dennis is curious about Synchronic, his investigations bringing him into contact with Doctor Patrick Kermani, the chemist who designed the synthetic drug to be similar to dimethyltryptamine, desperate to clear the streets of his creation, but already there is another call, another missing girl, Brianna Dannelly, Dennis’ teenage daughter.
The opening film of the FrightFest strand of the 2020 Glasgow Film Festival saw writer/director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead of The Endless in town for the UK premiere of the director’s cut of their latest “cosmic mystery” Synchronic, screened in its original form in September 2019 at the Toronto International Film Festival and now substantially re-edited.
More in keeping with the hallucinogenic vision of their premise, The Fall’s Jamie Dornan is distraught as Dennis, staying focused even as his wife drowns in her grief, and Altered Carbon’s Anthony Mackie is Steve, suffering from headaches and upping his doses of painkillers and making the promise that “he won’t become a junkie paramedic cliché” even as morphine vanishes from the ambulance, but will Synchronic offer relief or just change the problem?
New Orleans a turbulent city of excess, indulgence, desperation and poverty with a rich history from which the tapestry is woven, the narrative of Synchronic rapidly becomes dislocated in time, the viewers and Steve uncertain of what is real and what is not other than the dangers that manifest or which perhaps the users inflict upon themselves when under the influence.
In equal parts a character drama, a science fiction paradox and a sensory experience, Synchronic revels in the environment, the silence of the hospital contrasted with the noise of the streets, the neglected rides of the amusement park rusting as nature reasserts itself, tree branches and vines growing through the walls and pushing out humanity as the swamps reappear, coffins expelled from the earth and floating in the floodwater.
Synchronic the needle with plays with the grooves of time, with intelligent performance and a smart script which turn the carnival city into a surreal nightmare, the New Orleans locations give great character and flavour to the film, a meditation on death and life in which the rules of a broken reality must be established by trial and error and the present with its healthcare and rule of law is a miracle, Benson and Moorhead’s style made commercially accessible without compromising their artistic ethic.
The 2020 Glasgow Film Festival concluded on Sunday 8th March
