Redux Redux

For a little while, it seemed like everybody was making a movie about the multiverse, and very few of the ones I saw were doing anything interesting with it. The MCU introduced us to the multiverse in like six different movies, each one more tiresome than the last. Everything Everywhere All At Once wanted to use it to tell a tale of generational conflict and personal growth, but failed miserably by doing nothing with the actual multiverse aspect of it (yeah, I said it, EEAAO sucks, come at me). Even Happy Death Day 2 U, as much as enjoy it, couldn't nail it down the way its predecessor used time travel. Redux Redux is the first movie I've seen where the multiverse is as important to the character arcs as the characters themselves. A woman, grieving the murder of her daughter at the hands of a serial killer, goes to a parallel timeline in the hopes of finding her alive, only to find she's dead, so she kills the killer and goes on to the next universe. The multiverse aspect serves as a metaphor for addiction and the self-destruction possible when one does not process grief. Irene (played by Michaela McManus) funnels that refusal to accept reality into a one-person war against infinite versions of one man who keeps wronging her in every timeline. It is only when, in one timeline, she finds a teenage girl (Mia) held captive in his house, and Mia insists on coming with her to get revenge, that she begins to question her multiversal vendetta ride. By not facing her loss and funneling it into rage and revenge, what has she become? How much of Mia -- already traumatized from growing up in the foster system and then her experience with this killer -- will be irrevocably broken if she succumbs to the quest for revenge? It's not an especially original idea -- grief, shared trauma, and healing through found family is especially common these days -- but its the multiversal aspect that gives Redux Redux's play on it a new twist. I appreciate that it never indulges in what could've been hacky, hocky differences in the universes like the grass being purple or the global religion is Buddhism. The differences in timelines don't really matter; the whole conceit is there to function as her addiction and her way of refusing to process her pain. I also liked how it didn't get into the weeds on the specifics of how. That would've bogged down the proceedings. This is a story about the characters' journeys, not technical mumbo-jumho. I don't have much more to say other than Redux Redux hits on pretty much all aspects; directing is tight, acting is solid, the action is staged nicely, and character arcs are satisfying. It does everything I wanted and expected it to do. It's too bad this didn't get more attention, because it really deserves it.