The blazing opening scene of the McManus Brothers’ science fiction thriller Redux Redux promises a white-knuckle ride: a promise that it keeps while revealing a deep sense of humanity and longing which is fundamental to the intelligent and engaging film. Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) sets a tied-up man on fire. As he burns at her feet her face betrays a blankness and weariness. What should be an act of shocking extremity is mundane. How has this woman learned to violently kill without reaction?
The audience learns that it’s far from the first time she’s killed that man (Jeremy Holm). The man who took everything from her when he abused and murdered Anna her fourteen year old daughter. The man she encounters on every parallel Earth she travels to via a small metal trunk hoping to find the one universe where her daughter wasn’t a serial killer’s twelfth victim. After travelling to many hundreds of worlds and killing Neville, who mostly exists as a diner line-cook, she is battered, bruised, and led by the reality that she can’t allow him to get away with what he did. Neville also can’t continue to live because his proclivity for murdering teenaged girls will continue unabated.
Irene isn’t so much living as she is existing. Each world has subtle differences: a different coloured coffee cup at the diner or her motel room booked by someone else, but no difference is generally significant enough to change her plans and trajectory. Irene will kill the man (sometimes in his home, sometimes in the diner, sometimes with collateral damage). She will open his trophy box and take the lock of her daughter’s hair, his pay, and if she’s lucky not to attract police attention and initiate a manhunt for herself, she will get into her machine and move to the next world.
“Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair,” wrote Friedrich Schiller. With only an occasional hook-up with a sweet guy named Jonathan (Jim Cummings) Irene’s path is unbearably lonely. Every new world a reminder of the lack of Anna and a wound that is always open. That is until when once again breaking into Neville’s house she finds and rescues his next victim, Mia (a revelatory Stella Marcus) a fifteen year old in the foster system who has no intention of returning to her group home and becomes Irene’s charge and apprentice. A woman without a daughter meets a teen without a mother and Irene’s perspective on what life can afford her begins to change. Mia bolts headfirst into danger causing Irene’s rhythm and priorities to take on a new level of chaos. Although Irene hasn’t always stayed under the radar — she’s open fired on Neville in public — Mia’s own wounds and fury open them up to new dangers, and perhaps new possibilities.
Kevin and Matthew McManus are masters of suspense and cerebral science fiction concepts. With Redux Redux they open a door to damaged human hearts who over time have become torn. Irene and her long and pointless vendetta is as restless as Mia with her insecure group home placements. Two people who need to cauterise the past but are unable to do it without somewhere softer to land. Redux Redux never forgets the humanity of Irene and Mia in favour of multiversal fussiness. Each performance is finely calibrated to be authentic within impossible conditions. Jeremy Holm is terrifying in human beast form as the sadistic serial killer. Michaela McManus is incredible playing a woman who has lost herself but begins to find herself once she has a real reason to live; the firecracker Stella Marcus as Mia.
Redux Redux is a rare film that balances all its spinning plates; science fiction, serial killer, intense violence and heart pounding suspense with an emotionally brave and raw story of the loss of self inside grief. Redux Redux is one of the smartest films of the year.
Directors: Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus
Cast: Michaela McManus, Stella Marcus, Jeremy Holm
Writers: Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus
Producers: Nate Cormier, Marcela De Luna, PJ McCabe, Michael J. McGarry, Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus
Composer: Paul Koch
Editors: Nate Cormier, Derek Desmond