Benson & Moorhead Are Coming Back With The Drugged Out SYNCHRONIC
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are some our favorite working filmmakers. Unconstrained by genre limitations, the directorial duo have been operating on their own idiosyncratic wavelength since their debut, 2012's Resolution. With every film since, they've just kept getting better and better. Spring is a melancholy treatise on love during a quarter-life crisis, and The Endless finds them examining the very meaning of time and life itself by crafting a stealth "sidequel" to their very first picture (that works just as well as a stand-alone narrative). As I said when I reviewed their last intimate endeavor at Fantastic Fest 2017:
"But in the end, it's not aliens, monsters, or even a rope leading off into an unfathomable blackness (the movie’s most striking image) that takes over our imaginations. It’s these two guys, struggling to understand each other and existence while refusing to be prisoners of time or circumstance. In a way, The Endless becomes the perfect metaphor for Benson & Moorhead’s filmography thus far – a self-contained loop, in which comprehending one’s own failings can be far more terrifying than any standard nightmare imagery."
So, you can bet your ass that we got super excited when they announced a new project today: the drugged out sci-fi picture Synchronic. From the Deadline announcement, their movie will follow:
"...two New Orleans paramedics, whose lives are ripped apart after encountering a series of horrific deaths linked to a designer drug with bizarre, otherworldly effects."
Yes, please. I would like to watch that now. Sweetening this Big Easy pot is the fact that Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan have signed to star in the picture as the two aforementioned EMTs. That's a pretty big get for two guys who've been working on a small scale for a while now. Mackie especially should be able to help elevate their careers to the next level (much like he could with Joe Lynch's upcoming actioner Point Blank); having one of the damn Avengers in your movie is kind of a big deal.
Synchronic is written by Benson, and is being produced by David Lawson Jr. (who also helped put The Endless together). Can we already start planning to see the film at FF 2019? Since Spring and The Endless were audience favorites at past Fests, we can only hope this next one comes and kills those South Lamar auditoriums, too.
