Your initial reaction, after the opening 10 minutes of "Omni loop", may well be "C'mon! We don't need another Groundhog Day after the two trillion lookalikes that came after it". You grievance, at that point, may be justified. But watch on.
To being with, in this movie, the five-days (invariably) time loop is self-initiated, entirely controllable. The protagonist, upon doing poorly in a Princeton entrance exam, initiated the go-back-5-days loop. Lo and behold, you guessed it. The second time around, knowing the questions beforehand, she passed with flying colors and got into Princeton. I recount this is past tense because it happened in the past. This Princeton "cheating" incident is not shown as a flashback, but just comes out in a conversation, as told by the protagonist.
When the movie starts, Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) is 55, and about to die in a week or two because of "a black hole in her chest" as the doctor's picturesque diagnosis goes. What else can poor Zoya do but initiate this loop every 5 days, hoping that eventually she finds a cure for herself? These 5 days loops invariably ends with Zoya's nose bleeding, signifying that the end is coming. She goes into the bathroom, locks the door, takes out a bottle of pill and swallows one. The loop starts again with her waking up in hospital when the doctor, with the abovementioned picturesque diagnosis, declares that nothing more can be done and sends her home to spend her last days with her family. Surely, if you have read this far, you'll agree with me that this is not a Groundhog Day copycat. Even Christopher Nolan can do no better.
Zola has a loving family comprising husband Donald (Carlos Jacott), daughter Jayne (Hannah Pearl Utt) with her significant other. Having reliving these 5-day loops with them again and again (the movie does not explain how the repeated 5 days unfold in these other people's lives), Zola decides to break out of the routine, sneaks out of the hospital to knock on the door of a science student named Paula (Ayo Edebiri). The trajectory then becomes a sort of buddy story between Zola and Paula, with some pretty far-fetched time-travel technical stuff (including a sub-atomic size "nano-man" who may be able to help solve the mathematical problems) that we are better off ignoring. There is sufficient emotion ingredients, in Zola's interaction with her family and with Paula, to chew on.
