There was a time when the concept of a multiverse was left to modern philosophy and creative writing as the idea of worlds on top of worlds separated by frequency, many like our own except for the tiniest of differences, just seemed too out there. But as science developed more and more theories and these concepts infiltrated popular culture, the idea of a multiverse is about as commonplace in the zeitgeist as sliced bread. For their latest project, co-writers/co-directors Kevin and Matthew McManus (The Block Island Sound) not only utilize the concept of a multiverse, they do so in a way that trusts the audience to get it, thereby enabling the narrative to focus on what matters. The resulting film, Redux Redux, having its world premiere in the Midnighter section of SXSW 2025, is a film more interested in character than science fiction, allowing it to use the set dressing of a multiverse to explore the very real way in which grief can cause individuals to devour themselves forever.
Since the abduction and murder of her daughter, Irene (Michaela McManus) has had only one mission: to find the bastard who killed her and make him pay. Thanks to multiversal technology, Irene is able to kill and keep killing him over and over and over and over. But this grief-driven mission takes a turn when Irene comes across Mia (Stella Marcus) and everything she thought she wanted is challenged like never before, requiring her to face the one thing she hasn’t had to: herself.
The opening shot of a film has a heavy burden. It’s got to set scene, tone, and intention almost immediately. Some films do this utilizing landscape shots of the area, making it seem as though the audience is transitioning to the place of the story. Cold opens, wherein the audience is thrust into a film, are harder to accomplish, but there are massive rewards when executed well. This is the case with Redux Redux as the audience is given a fade-in to a woman we don’t know standing before a flame, each flicker helping to elucidate the scene. The woman stands still (not frozen, but focused) on something we cannot see, but the flames keep rising into frame as the electronic buzzing of the score meshes with the low screams of someone we realize is thrashing away inside the fire. The camera holds long enough for the audience to process what’s occurring before switching back to the tight mid-range shot of the woman as she watches him burn. In less than a minute, the McManus Brothers have told us a great deal about this film and its characters. These are two people in combat, their conflict brutal, and pleasure in the destruction absent. We can tell this from the cold observation of the woman, the subtle lift of her face as the man writhes: this is victory, but it’s not absolute. More than that, cinematographer Alan Gwizdowski (The Block Island Sound) has positioned the shot so that the intention is clear: what stands between the audience and the woman is this person she’s set aflame. We will remain at a distance until the work is complete, and this is very true until the introduction of Mia. That’s when everything really shifts, even if the job isn’t done. Until then, like a series of intrusive thoughts, the opening gives way to several more confrontations between the man and the woman, the narrative only giving us teases of information regarding motive and technological execution to fill in the blanks. The McManus Brothers trust the audience to understand what’s happening and, therefore, don’t budget unnecessarily with their dialogue, opting to use action, editing, and inference to convey what we need to know.
Michaela McManus as Irene in REDUX REDUX. Photo Credit: Alan Gwizdowski. Photo courtesy of Mothership Motion Pictures/SXSW.
What becomes quite clear is what’s driving the woman we come to know as Irene — a terrible grief. With one violently asked question by her to the man, we, the audience, now understand how someone could watch another burn so ambivalently, and that’s what enables us, even for a time, to settle in and root for Irene as she Groundhog Day’s (1993) her way through several tactical engagements with the man. Except, and this is a key difference, Irene isn’t living the same day over and over. She’s not being forced by some unseen or unknowable mystical power to relive the horror of her daughter’s murder and the subsequent confrontation with the man who did it. She’s seeking out each instance of him through the multiverse like some kind of blood-drenched Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). She’s choosing to find him, day after day, night after night, following a discrete and well-worn path to accomplish her goal. This is the intelligence of the script, which demonstrates that Irene’s been at this a while with her two sets of keyrings: one for his place and one for her own. Just by looking at the number of keys and the way that Irene tests them, we’re watching well past the first few times she’s killed him and she’s choosing to continue. But why? That’s the question, the real question that propels the film. The answer seems obvious at first, who wouldn’t want retribution on the person who took their child from them? But there’s a point wherein vengeance is no longer justice and, even if the man deserves it in any timeline across the multiverse, what does it say about the person who does the hunting so willingly? There are a million other ways to pursue vigilante justice across the multiverse, especially when you’ve been investigating someone for so long that you can keep killing them and getting away; but this is the route Irene chooses. To that end, Michaela’s performance as Irene is an absolute force, balancing a raw ferocity and broken tenderness whether Irene’s in the thick of combat or given just a little space for herself. In the non-combat sequences, Michaela makes Irene approachable and human, someone with whom we wouldn’t think twice about sharing a conversation over a meal, helping in our community, or otherwise consider as a non-violent offender. These moments of humanity make the turns toward violence all the more heartbreaking because we come to understand it as a choice.
What’s most fascinating about Redux Redux is the way it weaponizes Irene’s grief against herself. We presume that Irene is doing this out of a personal mission seeing as she has the technology to travel through the multiverse. But what is grief if not a prison we make for ourselves? We don’t know the circumstances that lead up to the choice to travel, only that Irene does. She’s perpetually on the move, perpetually finding new ways to murder the man. One would think we’d be rooting for her the entire way and, yet, there’s a cruelty to her actions that grows until a worrisome thought arises: what if it’s not him who she’s punishing? In this regard, if grief is a deep sorrow, an anguish over a loss, and the grief toward a child by a parent being the kind of pain virtually all pray to avoid, then what if it’s the grief that’s feeding this mission? What if Irene sees herself as the reason her daughter has died, some failure on her part that she can’t make right, and, thus, deserves to torture herself by living and reliving the failure over across the multiverse? The official synopsis uses the word “addiction” to describe what Irene’s doing, killing him over and over again, a compulsion that she can’t control. But what if it’s because doing the work to confront the grief is viewed as too hard, too complex, and too fearsome to confront? What would you rather face: your own perceived culpability or the person who did the deed? This is the true horror of Redux Redux, not the violent murders of the man or the man’s desire to murder, but the failure to protect one’s own and the self-punishment we’ll inflict because we think we deserve it.
Not everything about the film is as clean and impactful as the opening. There’s a brief romance element involving Jim Cummings (The Last Stop in Yuma County; frequent McManus Brothers collaborator) whose intention is to highlight Irene’s loneliness and the way she has tried to find normalcy within her multiversal travels, but its use is clunky at first, though the payoff is worth the inclusion. The conclusion, too, comes with its own questions that linger and not always in the most satisfactory of ways. Largely, however, Redux Redux is a paradoxically simple and complex affair. The introduction of Marcus’s Mia does a great job of answering many of the questions that the romance angle seeks to set up (doing so much more seamlessly), enabling clarification of details that can’t be simply inferred. Marcus’s performance belies an experienced actor and not someone on their first-feature. The structure of the narrative ebbs and flows without the sense of pretense or manufacture, allowing the story as it plays out before us to feel spontaneous and powerful. Different storytellers would get so caught up in the sci-fi elements that they’d feel the need to overexplain or needlessly make these portions VFX-driven, when it’s Michaela who makes the audience care deeply and intensely quite quickly. By keeping the focus on the characters, the fight for survival takes on an unexpected depth and profundity, generating a resonance that leaves its audience in meditative silence in the conclusion.
Screening during SXSW 2025.
In theaters February 20th, 2026.
For more information, head either to the official Redux Redux SXSW webpage or film production website.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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