(Above: Michaela McManus in Redux Redux (2025) via IMDB).

By M. Faust

Some movies just don’t look right without a drive-in around them. I realize that’s not an option for most of the world (one more reason to be grateful to live in a place when al fresco cinema is an option for at least half the year). But lowered expectations would do a lot to help watching two new sci-fi/fantasy/alt-reality indie films now in theaters. 

The laboriously titled Redux Redux follows Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) as she stalks and kills the short-order cook who murdered her daughter. She is eminently qualified for this task because she has already killed him about as many times as Bill Murray took piano lessons in Groundhog Day. 

Irene is not exactly reliving the same day over and over again (a premise that has gone stale with overuse in the decades since Harold Ramis’s comedy). Instead, she is stalking him though the multiverse (or multiverses, I’m not really sure). Her apparent goal is to kill Neville (Jeremy Holm) in every possible incarnation. 

I say “apparent” because Irene’s precise motivation is never explained. Is she doing this because her grief is too great to be extinguished by a single act of revenge? Or has it become an obsessive habit she can no longer control? But aside from a second-act speech in which she bemoans the loss of her humanity, we never get to look inside her mind. 

Leaving some things open to interpretation is generally necessary in a genre that involves an impossible situation. I get that the point of the movie is not to explore the concept of an infinite number of alternate universes, that the concept is used to provide a basis in which someone might re-enact the same event infinitely. But writer-directors the McManus Brothers (the star is their sister) make it impossible for us to relegate this concept to the background by dwelling on it for about a third of the film, raising even more questions. After her daughter’s murder, Irene found a group that had developed a technology enabling people to travel in between universes. Her device, which resembles a metallic coffin, is low on power, requiring her to seek a replacement in a subplot that takes too much time away from the main story. 

And the questions don’t stop coming at you. Apparently Irene can pick what universe she is going to. Wouldn’t that imply that all of them have been mapped? It makes no sense that these alternate universes would be identical but for small details, unless they only come into existence from the starting point when the traveler movies from one to another. If her traveling involves going backward in time, why not simply go back and take out Neville before he kills her daughter? And if the police were apparently unable to solve the case, how did she even learn Neville’s identity? 

There are about as many plot questions to Redux Redux as there are multiverses. I suppose that one has to remember what the gloriously named Basil Exposition (Michael York) says about such questions in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: “I suggest you don’t worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself.” If you can. 

Cold Storage takes a more tongue-in-cheek approach to an equally well-traveled sci-fi sub-genre, the Outer Space Virus That Might Wipe Out All of Humanity. Except that it’s a fungus, not a virus. And it’s not exactly from outer space: it is the result of NASA scientists trying to develop a fungicide for astronauts (and who knew that athlete’s foot was such a problem on space missions?) by launching a highly adaptive specimen into outer space to see what comes back. 

Which, as anyone who has ever seen more than three menace-from-space movies can tell you, is just never a good idea. Certainly the movie’s writer David Koepp knows this, having written and/or adapted most of the Jurassic Park movies, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, a few of the Indiana Jones entries—the list goes on and on. At this point he is far too familiar with genre tropes to take them seriously. 

Cold Storage opens with a trim prologue sequence in which the unfriendly fungus wreaks limited havoc in a remote Australian town. The situation is contained by a pair of hazmat-suited American military operatives. We recognize the quietly stentorious voice of the taller one as belonging to Liam Neeson, perfectly at home in this kind of thing. You might find yourself thinking that his companion sounds like British actress Lesley Manville, known for her work in so many Mike Leigh films. In fact, it actually is Lesley Manville, and how she got in this movie I’d love to know. 

Perhaps she came along with 89-year-old screen legend Vanessa Redgrave, whose appearance here is even more jaw-dropping. Maybe she has a vacation home in Rome, where much of the movie was filmed? 

After that opening the story moves to a self-storage facility somewhere in a flyover state. Here, for about half an hour, it seems to be turn into an uncredited remake of John Hughes’ Career Opportunities. If you remember that one—a pair of attractive young people trapped in a workplace overnight—you will understand my wondering whether the projectionist mixed up the reels. But of course there are no more projectionists, and before too long we start getting whiffs of The Return of the Living Dead. (Not enough, but that’s a high standard.) 

The young people are played by top-billed Georgina Campbell (also currently onscreen in Psycho Killer), and “Stranger Things”’ Joe Keery, who are almost pleasant enough to justify the inordinate amount of time this not very long movie spends on them. But fear not: eventually the unfriendly fungus gets to work producing gruesome moments to keep the special effects crews busy. (Which, I am happy to say, is not too gruesome: the R rating seems to be mostly for profanity.) It is by no means a classic, and a little more actual humor would have helped, but there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes at the movies.