Films about time travel tend to revolve around the ethics of causality. How will this thing that’s been altered in the past affect the future? Will it be worth it? Will there be unexpected consequences? Because no one tells a time-travel story where nothing gets changed – that’s just a flashback. Time travel is the plot device that offers a remedy for regret: the do-over. But tread carefully; one too many do-overs can send everything out of control, as evidenced in Jared Moshé’s Aporia.
Sophie (Greer) is a nurse living in Los Angeles with her 11-year-old daughter, Riley (Herman). Both of them are grieving the recent death of their husband/father, Mal (Gathegi), who was struck down by drunk driver Darby (O’Byrne). Mal was the glue that held the family together, it seems, and his absence has them potentially drifting irrevocably apart. Enter Jabir (Maadi), Mal’s physicist friend, who confides to Sophie that he and her late husband were building a time machine in Jabir’s spare bedroom. Just a couple of science-minded dudes throwing back a few cold ones and tinkering around with space and time. And while they were unsuccessful in building that time machine, Jabir explains that what they did build is a kind of particle accelerator that can send abstract particles back in time to create a burst of energy. They built a time gun. A gun that can fire a bullet into the past, as long as you know the exact coordinates – which, thanks to Instagram, is entirely feasible. It takes Sophie about 30 seconds of movie time to give the go-ahead to knock off Darby, and voilà, Mal is back. He never left, and the weird but small changes to Sophie’s life – her shifts at the clinic are different now – mean nothing because now the nuclear family is restored.
As Jabir continues to work on extending the length of time the gun can reach back to (and execute a predestined mass shooter in his downtime), Sophie becomes preoccupied with Darby’s widow, Kara (Cox), and his daughter, Aggie (Cienfuegos), who haven’t been doing too well since Darby mysteriously died of a brain aneurysm on a camping retreat. Sophie’s guilt drives her to put another photon into the chamber and fire it back to the past to help them out. Course corrected, case closed. But no, these things are never so simple. No time crime goes unpunished.
Writer/director Moshé (South by Southwest 2017 selection The Ballad of Lefty Brown) grounds the tension of the various ethical dilemmas in Aporia by focusing more on his characters than on the gimmick of his delightfully lo-tech time murder machine. As Sophie and Mal confront increasingly complicated conundrums, the sci-fi drama maintains an insightful and compassionate perspective that finds a lot more interesting things to say about cause and effect than, say, wondering if someone should point a time gun at Hitler. It’s a film that considers that life may be less about what you have or can get, and more about what you are willing to give up.
This article appears in August 11 • 2023.