Synchronic is a science fiction cosmic horror drama directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson and starring Anthony Mackie.
Paramedics Steve Danube (Mackie) and Dennis Donnally (Jamie Dornan) have seen some pretty horrifying things on the job, but recently they've been seeing cases with bizarre, unexplainable deaths, all of which are connected to a new designer drug, Synchronic. However, after Dennis's daughter goes missing during one of these cases, Steve investigates and discovers that Synchronic is far more than a mere drug - and challenges his view in reality itself.
List of tropes applying to this film:
- Achievements in Ignorance: Dr. Kermani was just trying to make a designer drug, but wound up basically inventing a time machine completely by accident.
- Ambiguous Ending: Dennis takes the hand of Steve, who is fading in and out of reality. The credits roll before we find out if this hard contact with the present will pull Steve back into the present, or if he will remain stuck in the past.
- The Atoner: Dr. Kermani, the creator of Synchronic, deeply regrets making the drug and the lives lost as a result, and is trying to destroy every last sample of it.
- Bittersweet Ending: Steve reconciles with Dennis and saves his daughter, but he may be trapped in the past in the process, and he is dying of a brain tumor anyway.
- Continuity Nod: During Steve's encounter with the voodoo cult, the staff the priest holds is almost identical with the signature pillars from The Endless.
- Deadpan Snarker: Steve is pretty snarky, always ready with some sort of barb.
- Diabolus ex Nihilo: Right when Brianna and Steve are about to travel back to the present, a looter holds them up and, mistaking Steve for a slave, tries to steal him and kill Brianna.
- Doomed Protagonist: Steve, thanks to his brain tumor.
- Driven to Suicide: A report over the radio reveals Dr. Kermani killed himself,
- Gorn: The looter being blown apart by an artillery shell.
- Lovecraft Lite: The film toys a lot with existentialist dread and the nature of reality, but ultimately takes the slightly more idealistic approach that your connections with other people is all that really matters, and the characters manage to earn a Bittersweet Ending.
- Secretly Dying: Steve keeps the fact that he's dying of a brain tumor under wraps for a while.
- Sophisticated as Hell: Steve monologues after meeting a caveman while time traveling.Steve: And in that moment, seeing what years of barely surviving is like, this man, probably ten years younger than me but looking older despite his paleo diet, that I realized… The past fucking sucks, man!
