Recommendation | Redux Redux

In a series of scenes lacking context and clarity. The heroine is sitting at a café. They don’t know her, but she knows them. The heroine kills someone and flees from the police into a strange machine. The heroine hooks up with a guy outside a support group meeting. She remembers him, but he doesn’t remember her. Irena Kelly’s life was destroyed when a man seduced her daughter and murdered her. There is no home anymore, no life. Only one goal: to find this man and murder him in retribution. But as we have learned from countless revenge films, revenge is not satisfying. 

Only Irina has a solution- she lives her life in a loop – not a loop of time travel, but of interdimensional travel. Instead of obsessing over her daughter’s death in the past, she can experience it over and over again, in a constant search for a dimension where the killer fails, and she can be reunited with her daughter. Along the way, she not only finds the man who killed her daughter and kills him but continues to kill the son of a bitch over and over again.

Despite its unsettling opening, Redux Redux is not a difficult film to follow. The concept is complex, but the film remains in constant action mode while keeping the viewer engaged, without being heavy or dull. Throughout the film, we get answers to the questions raised in the opening, and the world-building expands while striking a balance between developing classic sci-fi curiosity and limiting the weight of the exposition. The film’s pace is riveting, as Irina’s journey starts to fail in every possible way. First, unsurprisingly, she finds a girl tied up in the killer’s apartment, only it is not her daughter. 

Mia, a girl with a mountain of problems of her own, wants to join Irina’s project. If she can’t deal with the past that led her to run away from the orphanage, then maybe she can at least shoot it. As you can imagine, Irina is not keen on the idea, but Mia is not willing to take “no” for an answer, and the two are forced to work together.

Despite its focus on action a little tiresome philosophizing about trauma, the film takes its themes seriously. Revenge only leaves the victim in a perpetual state of it. Just as those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder cannot stop reliving their experiences over and over again, those seeking revenge re-inject the formative event into their lives and are doomed to relive it again and again.

Nietzsche believed that we should live our lives as if we were in an eternal loop. The goal is to live the kind of life that we would be happy to live over and over again forever. Everything we have lost will be ours again, and we will lose it again. Irina distorts this logic with her attempt to reverse the direction of the loop or at least halt it at a specific moment. In order to come to terms with her life, she must accept that what was is not what will be, and still love what there is. 

Only that Irina rejects the ideas of healing and forgiveness; she wants to have it all, and Mia, who was clearly planted there to be her replacement daughter, will never be a true substitute. Through action and suspense, the film repeatedly challenges Irina’s ideas, confronting her with the choice between desperately trying to regain the security of the past- which will trap her in a cycle of violence where she will ultimately lose everything- and the opportunity to build something new.

So, what does the film want from us? In response to violence, in response to having what is most precious to us taken from us, should we forgive and forget? No. Redux Redux serves us excellent action. Nietzsche also said that there is a special pleasure in causing pain, so in his opinion, the pleasure of revenge is compensation for injustice. Redux allows us to see a perverted murderer getting what he deserves. Like the bartender filling the glass, he says it’s our last one for the night. We need to know when to stop. Redemption is not at the bottom of the glass, nor at the bottom of the barrel. If we don’t understand this, our story will end as the film begins.