‘Aporia’ review: Dir. Jared Moshe [Fantasia 2023]

Before getting into the review of Aporia, it is important to address the elephant living on the film’s IMDB page. If you navigate to the website, under Aporia’s trivia there is an entry listing it as a potential secret Cloverfield film. Quite where this idea and information has been sourced from is unclear as Aporia has no connection with those movies. Instead of a surprise Cloverfield movie, director Jared Moshe has made a science-fiction tinted emotional drama that explores grief, loss, and the lengths some will go to to keep their family together. 

Starring Judy Greer and Edi Gathegi as married couple Sophie and Mal, Aporia opens with the pair discussing their forthcoming child. It is a tender and intimate moment between the soon-to-be parents. Aporia then leaps forward in time. Sophie is reintroduced, but the vibrancy and warmth previously presented is nowhere to be seen. The reason for this is that she is grieving the death of Mal who was killed in a drink-driving accident. Their daughter Riley (Faithe Herman) is now turning eleven and the child savagely rejects Sophie’s attempts at connection. 

In fact every aspect of Sophie’s life is now different. She is barely holding her job together and has to rely on family friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) to help look after Riley. The only thing keeping Sophie afloat is the hope that Mal’s killer will be brought to justice, but after another setback at court, she spirals into despair. It is at this point that Jabir presents her with an alternate option, the use of his murder machine…

The character of Jabir is a fascinating one. Kept on the periphery of the story, in another film he would be an equally compelling lead. An immigrant working as a taxi driver, Jabir is actually a qualified physicist. It is a familiar story for American immigrants; many having to take any job available, despite having university degrees. Jabir hasn’t left his former career fully behind however; in his spare time he has been working on creating a time machine. Whilst those efforts have failed, he has succeeded in developing a machine capable of assassinating anyone from the not-too-distant past. Their deaths then realigns timelines, which consequently changes the present. Sophie is presented with a moral quandary – does she use the machine to save Mal even if it means sacrificing another life? 

This being a science-fiction film, Sophie inevitably tries the machine, but the results are not as straightforward as Sophie and Jabir had hoped. What follows is a story of conflicts and questionable decisions. Aporia can be viewed as a more arthouse version of the likes of The Butterfly Effect. In Aporia the new timelines are never quite as bleak as in the 2004 film, but the results have far more emotional heft. The themes, ideas, and quandaries explored in Aporia are suitably complex for a time-travel adjacent story, though it is the intensity of the human emotions, and the desire to cling onto those dear that really makes Aporia sing. Aporia demonstrates that life is never perfect, no matter how hard you try. As Sophie gets further entwined with Jabir’s machine, her idyllic life unravels as she tries to achieve an unattainable utopia. 

The entirety of Aporia puts Judy Greer through the wringer. Known to wider audiences for her comedy work, here she shows that she has the edge for more drama driven stories too. Her background as a comedian presents an easy shorthand between the audience and Sophie. Greer’s prior work already having won the viewer over means that not much time is needed to set Sophie up as a character to root for. But it is Greer’s interpretation of the character that really sells her. Greer plays Sophie almost completely stripped back. The layers have been peeled away and her performance tugs on the heartstrings. Greer leans into the universal aspects of grief and desperation, celebrating Sophie’s complexities and creating an enticing protagonist. 

Aporia takes an eternal science-fiction quandary and grounds it into family life. In doing so it creates a sublime emotional drama and tells it with the framework of a morally complicated concept. 

Aporia was reviewed at Fantasia International Film Festival.