Aporia – Fantasia 2023

SHOWTIMES 8511466

A grieving woman uses a time-bending machine to return her dead husband in Aporia. Sophie (Judy Greer) is having trouble returning to everyday life after her husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) is killed by a drunk driver, which includes an estranged relationship with their teenage daughter Riley (Faithe Herman). However, Sophie learns from Mal’s physicist best friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that he and Mal were developing a particle engine that could kill someone in the past. Sophie and Jabir successfully kill the drunk driver and brings Mal back into Sophie’s life. However, Sophie soon becomes concerned about the ethical repercussions of manipulating the past.

Aporia Synopsis

Aporia is a speculative sci-fi drama written and directed by Jared Moshe. As the film starts off, Sophie is greatly struggling in coping with her husband Mal’s death, which includes her being frustrated that the drunk driver Darby (Adam O’Byrne) still gets to walk free. While using Jabir’s particle engine seemingly succeeds at bringing Mal back, Sophie is bothered by the small changes it causes in her life and how it ruins the life of Darby’s widow Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) and her daughter Aggie (Veda Cienfuegos). Jabir wants to continue using the machine to help people, but both Sophie and Mal become concerned about how far the butterfly effect will reach.

My Thoughts on Aporia

Aporia isn’t as much a time travel film, as it is a time manipulation film. While originally intended to be a time machine, Jabir’s participle engine is only able to send particles to a specific point in time, killing whomever they interact with. As such, the film becomes much more about the butterfly effect and how changing a single event in the past can have wide-spreading repercussions in the present.

The definition of the title of Aporia is that of either an expression of real or pretend doubt or a logical impasse or contradiction. As such, the title can be in reference to the growing regret that Sophie has about manipulating time, despite Jabir initially warning her that there is no undo button. I don’t pretend to understand all the science of Aporia, but there does come a point in the film, where the audience will think that despite good intentions, perhaps it is best that the timeline remain untouched.

Aporia will probably end up standing alongside films such as Shane Carruth‘s Primer, in how it tries to treat the subject of time manipulation in as scientifically accurate a way as possible. While a scene of Jabir explaining particle physics to Sophie went right over my head, I did appreciate the effort to explain what is depicted in the film as a mass of cables and old computers. For those who like their science fiction stories to emphasize the science of it all, Aporia is a film that is worth checking out.

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Trailer for Aporia – Fantasia 2023