Redux Redux (2025)
Directed & Written by Kevin & Matthew McManus
Starring Michaela McManus, Jim Cummings, & Jeremy Holm.

Drama / Horror / Sci-Fi

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SPOILERS!

Kevin and Matthew McManus’s The Block Island Sound was such a unique film while treading familiar paranoid territory to most genre fans that anybody in their right mind who watched it should’ve been immediately anticipating their next film, and it comes as no surprise that Redux Redux takes on often tackled genre fare—parallel universe travel—while walking a fresh path. The film follows a woman called Irene (Michaela McManus) as she hunts down the man who murdered her daughter. Except she does this over and over, hopping from one parallel universe to the next via a mysterious machine. The routine’s already getting old when we come upon Irene, though it really starts to take on a different context when something unexpected happens after Irene travels to a parallel universe where she finds her daughter’s killer isn’t alone.

There are many simple films about revenge where a real-life occurrence of violence sends someone, all too often a man, on a path to violence, and Redux Redux isn’t one of those due to the way the McManus brothers tackle the transformative powers of grief through revenge. Irene’s repeated travel to parallel universes that allow her a chance to relive killing the man who killed her daughter brings about a whole new take on how revenge can turn the one seeking revenge into an equally monstrous person as the monster they’re seeking revenge against in the first place. Irene gets a second chance at protecting someone who desperately needs protecting which can potentially break the brutal spell revenge has cast over her, offering a way out of a never ending cycle driven by grief. She fights not to let herself be consumed by the monsters and the abyssal darkness Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about in Beyond Good and Evil: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Irene’s focus on revenge stems partly from the fact that, no matter how many parallel universes she visits, she can never return to one where her daughter isn’t murdered and their lives go on unaltered. Even later in a pivotal scene when Irene discovers a new parallel universe where her daughter’s alive and grown, Irene can’t alter the fabric of time and space by inserting herself into her daughter’s life, especially when she, too, exists in that universe. No matter if Irene travelled to 100 different universes where her daughter was still alive, she could never relive the original life they were living together. So she descends into the depths of her own soul, murdering her daughter’s killer repeatedly, which does nothing to bring her daughter back and only erodes her soul piece by piece. She doesn’t even have time to interrogate her issues with grief and revenge until she stumbles onto Mia, who’s about to become another victim of her daughter’s murderer. Irene tells Mia at one point: “I‘m not me anymore. I don‘t even know what I am.” And it’s really only through Mia that Irene finds some way of relieving her grief, as well as the guilt she feels connected to her daughter’s brutal killing.

Apart from the theme of grief and the monstrosity that can come from obsession with revenge, Redux Redux gives the audience glimpses into parallel universes that are no less based on capitalism, greed, and violence than the universe in which we exist currently. A fun thing about the film is that the McManus brothers don’t get bogged down in hard sci-fi or a long-winded explanation of the universe-hopping machine Irene uses. We do get one sequence during which Irene and Mia seek out a new energy core for Irene’s machine, only for it to take a near-harrowing turn once a couple people acting like they’re interested in selling a core attack the pair. In spite of all the technology available in the near future Redux Redux depicts, the violence of capitalist greed hasn’t diminished.
A beautifully tragic moment in Redux Redux occurs when Irene sees her daughter grown in a new parallel universe. Here, Irene’s haunted by the possibilities of a parallel universe and she’s also happy there’s another existence in which her daughter is able to live. It’s a bittersweet experience for Irene and the audience alike. Travelling between parallel universes is full of difficulties, particularly psychological ones. Mia gets killed in one parallel universe while she continues to exist in the film’s narrative across other parallel universes. She remarks to Irene that her murderer is going to “see my fucking ghost,” planning on haunting him through her own act of revenge. Even Irene is dead in another existence, having succumbed to the grief over her daughter’s murder and killed herself; this, like her daughter’s murder, extends into other parallel universes, too. This is perhaps the most important theme lingering in the air throughout Redux Redux: death is inescapable, one way or another, no matter how much technology we have at our fingertips.

In the end, Irene starts to understand death’s inescapability and, on some level, accepts that death will never stop for anybody—not Irene, not even time nor space—so you might as well deal with the grief it brings in a constructive way rather than let it destroy you, over and over and over. She’s able to figure it all out due to her unexpected meeting and eventual journey with Mia. She both saves Mia from literal death and saves her from a spiritual death by not allowing her to be swallowed whole by revenge. Redux Redux is about confronting monstrosity while refusing to let monstrosity change you. Irene looks long into the abyss Nietzsche famously warned of and, after a universe-spanning struggle, chooses not to let the abyss seep into her own soul, refusing to continue on with monstrous violence in revenge against the monstrous violence done to her daughter.