By Robert Scucci
| Published
In 1994, The Simpsons had a “Treehouse of Horror” short called “Time and Punishment,” in which Homer experiences the butterfly effect first-hand when the smallest alteration of the past changes his present day reality as he knows it. Taking an infinitely more serious approach to the same concept (read: no modified toaster oven), 2023’s Aporia explores a similar chain of cause and effect, but with consequences that I’m still trying to unpack in my brain, days after streaming the title on Hulu.
Disorienting by design, Aporia somehow manages to do the impossible by explaining manipulated timelines and alternate realities without ever getting too convoluted for the viewer as its principal characters dig themselves deeper into realities that they no longer recognize because their identities are shifting faster than they can ever possibly comprehend.
From Grief, To Gratitude, To Guilt
Taking center stage in Aporia is Sophie Rice (Judy Greer), a single mother who struggles to raise her daughter, Riley (Faithe Herman), after the tragic passing of her husband, Malcolm (Edi Gathegi).
Malcolm, who was killed by a drunk driver named Darby Brinkley (Adam O’Byrne) before the events that occur in Aporia, worked with long-time physicist Jabir Karim (Payman Maadi), who was secretly building a time machine with him before his unexpected death. What Sophie didn’t know, however, was that Jabir kept working on the project, resulting in a machine that doesn’t allow time travel, but rather the ability for its users to alter the past by using its energy to kill a specific target, thereby altering the present-day timeline.
While Jabir originally designed the machine to prevent his family from being massacred by an act of terrorism, he suggests that his machine isn’t yet powerful enough for his personal wants and needs, but isn’t against trying to eliminate Darby, thereby preventing Malcolm’s death and reuniting him with a grieving Sophie.
Holy Heck It Worked!
Sophie and Malcolm’s reunion in Aporia is bittersweet because she gets her soulmate back, but he never remembers dying, and her enthusiasm for his “return” doesn’t go unnoticed. Confessing to Sophie about the machine he and Jabir were developing, Malcolm is shocked to find out that she used the same exact machine to bring him back to life. Sophie begins to spiral after looking into Darby Brinkley’s life on the alternate timeline, and it turns out he was an amazing step-father who didn’t drink, which causes his family to fall apart when the machine works and he suddenly dies of a stroke on the alternate timeline, which then causes Sophie to feel a tremendous amount of guilt for what she had done.
Realizing the power they have to change the world for the better (or worse) in Aporia, Sophie, Malcolm, and Jabir grapple with the ethics of playing God in this fashion, and have no feasible way to calculate every single consequence of their actions if the changes they want to make to the past are too dramatic. As more and more past events get manipulated, and additional layers of abstraction resulting from their process are added to the mix, the trio is horrified to find out that without having their own memories from the various timelines unrelated to their own lives that they’re altering, they have no say in what will happen, and no recollection of the many different lives their physical beings have worked through.
Jabir, knowing that the series of tragedies in his own life led to the creation of his machine in the first place, comes to the realization that bringing his family back will undo the course of events that he finds himself, Sophie, Malcolm, Riley, and the rest of the world experiencing on their present-day timeline, and a decision has to be made to either reset everything, or stop doing what they’re doing and continue living the lives they’ve transitioned into after irreparably altering the space-time continuum.
A Space-Time Fever Dream
There are two lines of dialogue in Aporia that sum up the entire movie perfectly: “You have no idea who I am,” and “I’m Sorry.” Illustrating the point that removing a tragedy from your life will tear somebody else’s life apart in the process, Aporia takes you on a mental rollercoaster that has too many ups and downs to count, all while making you wonder if the people you’re rooting for are even the same people you started familiarizing yourself when you first hit ‘play.’
If you want your mind to be snapped in half as history continually rewrites itself in real time, all you have to do is stream Aporia, which is currently available on Hulu as of this writing.
