**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé
by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning “irresolvable internal contradiction,” Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can’t quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they’re trying to cause. For what it’s worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn’t addressed in any meaningful way–nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it’s a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey’s Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey’s Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver’s wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.
I liked the machine itself a lot, what with it being connected to a first-generation home computer, complete with one of those glow-in-the-dark green monitors I suspect caused me to need glasses. It’s cobbled together with wire and bubblegum, reminding me of the doohickey a dead nephew leaves behind in Stephen King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”–the one that makes real whatever you type into it but is so poorly constructed that it’s only got a few manifestations before it goes up in a puff of white smoke. All the ingredients for a solid genre exercise are here, in other words: a superlative cast and a strong twist on the time-travel gag. And Aporia delivers, for the most part. I like how Malcolm is instantly suspicious of Sophie’s suddenly affectionate and attentive demeanour post-temporal resurrection, and I like how each of the three heroes (Sophie, Malcolm, Jabir) has conflicting opinions on the best use of their technology. I even like the sense of inevitable doom with which writer-director Jared Moshe burdens each of the trio’s choices, with Sophie going “blood simple” from murdering a person who obviously needs to be murdered. Where it all starts to fall apart for me is perhaps the very point the film is making: that it’s generally impossible to predict how any one event will impact every other event.
That’s of course the premise underpinning “the butterfly effect,” though it renders the characters’ decisions for changing the past moot before the larger consideration of how you just shouldn’t do it. They fuck around a couple more times, doing their best to make the world a better place–and all of a sudden their daughter is a different Riley (now Elohim Nycalove), and Sophie lives out a nightmare of being on stage without having rehearsed a minute of her part, and…and I think the pleasure of texts like these is in trying to figure out the chain of events that might lead to certain eventualities rather than a blanket ban on any actions. I mean, we knew that already. More troubling, Aporia collapses under scrutiny. Not for the temporal conundrum of randomly remembering other timelines, but rather because it exists in a curious space where its message revolves around being grateful for what you have and maybe not worrying so much about other folks’ troubles. If Sophie doesn’t decide to help Kara, after all, she avoids most of the weird shit that follows. I have no issue with a misanthropic outcome, but Moshe ends things on a Schrödinger’s cliffhanger tipped, I think, by a satisfied smile on Sophie’s face as she looks at something we aren’t allowed to see. So is Aporia saying you shouldn’t fuck with the past twice but three times is the sweet spot? And why didn’t the machine break even though it was set up to explode? Anyway, it’s fine. Time for a Looper rewatch.
