Synchronic was definitely not the journey I was expecting.
“Why?” might you ask?
Because the movie was bat-shit wild, just like the spectator watching it. Marketed as a sort of genre blend between science fiction, thriller, horror, and sometimes comedy, Synchronic follows the lives of two paramedics, Steve Denube and Dennis Dannelly, as they try to uncover the mystery behind a new designer drug known as the film’s title. It is eventually discovered that the drug has the capability to send someone back into the past to live that reality for approximately seven minutes. Looking at the film, you get this feeling it’s going to follow the narrative conventions of something similar to those “buddy cop” films that involve a White man protagonist(Dennis)and their Black sidekick( Steve), which tend to mostly center the experiences of its White hero and leaves the Black characters to the margins. Ironically enough, Synchronic both follows through and struggles with that same problem.
The majority of the time in the film is spent around Steve’s characters. Set and based in New Orleans, Steve often reminiscences on the tragic day of Hurricane Katrina, an event that easily sets off racial tones and warnings when conjured up in the American popular imagination. The brutal moments of terror flash by as Steve seems to almost “live in the past” with his old family as he sees their coffins being pushed up to shore. This intense focus and focalization around Steve’s narrative was a welcoming surprise, especially in genre conventions like horror where Black people are subject to intense forms of gratuitous violence and eventual literal death.
The film continues to rely on racialized imagery to signify the importance and construction of racialization and specifically blackness. I can’t claim to know the intentions of what Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhed as creative directors intended by doing such. However, there is no doubt in my mind that these images are leading and serving a purpose. From the flashbacks of his dead family members to taking the synchronic drug himself and finding his way in an undisclosed town during the 1920s filled with KKK members chasing after him, the film is meant to be engaged and experienced in conversation with discussions on racialized violence, history, and the construction of time. That being said, this is what ends up making the ending all that more unfortunate.
The ending of the film sees Steve searching for Dennis’ daughter, Breanna, who it is later revealed on in the film that she got stuck somewhere in time. Steve looks relentlessly for his daughter, while White father Dennis is noticeably aloof, absent, and passive in the search for his daughter. A point that is well brought up many times and highlighted in many scenes, like when Dennis and his wife Tara get into argument because her husband shows no active interest and investment in trying to find his own daughter. Steve searches for Breanna and eventually finds her alive in a trench of bodies during the War of 1812. When the two reunite, they make plans to escape that violent past only to have them get stopped and Steve shot at by what we can infer as an American soldier who mistakenly believes that Steve is a slave.
This is the part of the film where I was shitting bricks because I already knew what the fuck was finna go down. In a melodramatic, tear-jerking, but expected moment, Steve sacrifices himself so that Breanna can escape back to the present time with her father, meanwhile, Steve is forgotten about in the violent wheels of the past as the clock of the present and future move on without him. The film fades to black as Steve appears like a ghost-like image in the present, signifying how he’s both stuck in the present, but only as a fleeting figure of the past that can never truly engage with the world in the way that he once did, and then the film ends.
This film took me through a rollercoaster of emotions, states of mind, and God knows what else. From dark moments of comedy to truly gut-wrenching racial terror, Synchronic came to play no games. And overall, I can say that the film was pretty good overall, but alas this isn’t a review writing account and the narrative decision to leave Steve in that horrible violent past is something I have a hard time grappling with. Not only that, but I am truly amazed and somewhat alarmed by the extreme devotion that Steve seems to have towards Dennis’ daughter. I don’t mean to suggest anything romantic or sexual between the two characters, especially given the fraught public history of relationships between Black men and White women in this country. But, I find it very disturbing that this Black man would truly give it all for one White girl for him to have to endure the violence of enslavement or the pain of cancer until it kills him.
