The McManus brothers murder their way through the multiverse in ‘Redux Redux’: “It’s a revenge movie with a twist”
If you’ve been anywhere near a cinema in the last few years, then you’ll know fine well that the multiverse is big business these days. However, you won’t have seen it explored the way it is in writers, directors, and siblings Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux.
In an age where Marvel and DC, Hollywood’s two biggest comic book behemoths, have been exploring alternate realities, and in a time when Everything Everywhere All at Once traversed the multiverse all the way to a ‘Best Picture’ win at the Academy Awards, the McManus brothers have found a fresh spin.
Starring their sibling, Michaela, in the lead role, the ambitious blend of high-concept sci-fi and revenge thriller finds the actor’s Irene Kelly moving from one timeline to the next with only one goal in mind; tracking down and killing the man responsible for her daughter’s disappearance and murder in her own reality before he gets the chance to do it again in the next one.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, though, with Irene butchering her way through an innumerable number of alternate universes that are only ever so slightly different from her own, before a chance encounter with Stella Marcus’ Mia sets a chain of events in motion that brings them together with a shared aim in mind.
Kevin and Matthew have been sitting on Redux Redux for a while, with principal photography wrapping in the summer of 2024 before the film premiered at South by Southwest the following March. With a February 20th, 2026, release date looming ever closer, the McManii can’t wait to share their latest work with the world.
“Every movie is like a sprint and a marathon all at the same time,” Kevin admitted to Far Out. “And like, you shoot the thing and then, I mean, we took maybe 10 years to come up with, or to finally get the thing off the ground, and then between shooting it and premiering it at the film festivals, it’s less than a year, and you’re doing the festival route, and it can be kind of exhausting, but also really fulfilling.”
Fortunately, the finish line is in sight, and “knowing that a much larger audience can finally get access to it” is finally within their grasp. As mentioned, Hollywood is very much into the multiverse, which the filmmakers view as both a blessing and a curse, because their idea predates not only the superheroes who’ve been dabbling, but pretty much everyone and everything else, too, pun intended.
“Yeah, it’s a funny thing,” Matthew concurred. “It’s definitely a trend in our career, coming up with something before it’s big and then delivering it way after it’s gone and passed. But what I think was kind of nice about that is, when we first wrote the script for this film, there was a big, long explanation for how the multiverse works, and we thought we’d have to bring the audience to water on this subgenre a bit.”
Thanks to everyone and their granny knowing about the multiverse by this point, Redux Redux was able to “strip that monologue, because the audience is pretty sophisticated about the subgenre.” In that respect, “it’s been a nice thing,” and as he accurately pointed out, their movie is “pretty different than a lot of the other multiverse stories that you get out there.”
Still, the opportunity for cross-pollination presents itself. Memes and movie marketing have increasingly gone hand-in-hand, so who’s to say some enterprising internet users won’t capitalise on the multiversal trend by killing two birds with one stone, and promising that ‘Irene will return in Avengers: Doomsday‘?
“We haven’t gotten that call yet, but we’re waiting by the phone, for sure!” Matthew laughed. “Yeah, it’s weird,” Kevin added, tongue planted firmly in cheek. “Maybe it’s in my spam folder.” One of the perils of any multiverse story, regardless of whether it’s been made for hundreds of millions of dollars or just a few, is the danger of exposition.
As the McManus brothers reasoned, they didn’t have to spell things out since they trusted their audience enough to be familiar with the ins and outs of the central concept. And yet, there’s still plenty of world-building required to lay the groundwork in Redux Redux, a bullseye they were cognisant of trying to hit.
“The goal we had going into it was to try and tell the audience just the right amount, to try and engage them, and get them wondering what kind of movie it is,” Kevin opined. “The first act, there’s a question of what genre it is, if you know nothing about it. You might think, after watching the first cycle of kills, that this is a time travel movie, and as she’s going back in time to do it again, and then you realise, well, the circumstances are different, the character’s in a different place, things have changed.”
“And hopefully, as you’re peeling back that onion, you’re realising what genre you’re actually in and having some fun with that,” he continued. “It really got inspired by movies like No Country for Old Men, or Blue Ruin, where the first act of Blue Ruin and throughout No Country, you’re really following a character’s process, and you’re trying to figure out what they’re doing, what they’re going to do next, how that’s going to get foiled.”
That’s what engages them as viewers, and that was what they wanted to bring to their own film. That, and making things engrossing enough to avoid another modern scourge of the moviegoing experience. “It forces you to put your phone down,” Kevin said. “To not run off to the bathroom, to not go get another beer. It really makes you focus on the story, and I find that to be such an immersive quality when you’re one step behind.”
There are some contextual clues to fill the audience in on some of the ins and outs, with Matthew elaborating that “it’s set up very much like a loop movie in those first ten minutes,” and they didn’t want anyone to think that’s what Redux Redux is. They were admittedly curious to see if those hints that it’s a multiverse story would be picked up on, and to their relief, “It’s been a delight to see that they have.”
That said, there were still issues. “I’ll say there’s one drawback to it,” Kevin took over. “All of our movies up to this point, continuity is always a disaster, and we’re like, ‘Whatever. Who cares? No one notices.’ If they notice in this, then you’ve got a bigger problem, so continuity became much more of a focus on this one. I think we did a pretty good job, but I’m sure people will point out some of those errors!”
As the McManus brothers mentioned, this is an idea they’ve been tinkering with for a decade. On the other hand, ‘A woman who travels through an infinite number of universes and keeps killing the guy who killed her daughter’ is nothing if not a highly specific concept to settle on, which was kind of the point.
“Instead of being about wildly different worlds, the concept of, ‘If there’s an infinite amount of universes, the differences between them might be infinitely small’, it gives our character this opportunity to try and change her own circumstances,” Kevin offered, with that process of them all being so similar proving “so maddening, it really sends her onto her revenge cycle.”
As much as they didn’t want to over-explain the minutiae, the filmmakers had to know. They laid down all the rules and regulations for how the worlds of Redux Redux work, and without relying on exposition or spoon-feeding, placed their trust in the hands of the audience to figure it out, albeit with one exception.
“When we were putting this together, we really wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so that there was not a big barrier to entry for audiences,” Matthew confirmed. “The scene where you really get the most in that is when they’re in that bunker, and all of a sudden you get all of these new clues for the deeper kind of world-building that we had developed.”
“We’re the kind of filmmakers who want to make sure our science fiction is always a little bit out of norm’s length, and you’re much more focused on the characters and their relationships.”
Matthew McManus
To that end, the film starts off with an eye-catching image. If you’re going into Redux Redux completely cold, you’ll be wondering why the movie’s protagonist is standing over a man, who’s been tied to a chair and set on fire. The look on her face makes it clear that it isn’t a victorious moment, and it was only added late in the day when the McManus siblings realised they needed to grab attention from the get-go.
“It was actually never in the script,” Kevin revealed. “We kept going back and forth saying, ‘We need something that gets the audience’s attention right away and gets them off their phone, honestly, like, put your phone down and start watching!'”
After a conversation with the special effects and stunt teams, the light bulb went off: “You know, lighting a guy on fire is not that complicated; they’ve been doing it forever,” he beamed. “Of course, we could do that, so we dove right into that concept of tying a guy to a steel chair, lighting him on fire, and putting our sister right in front of him!”
“It was about the longest eight seconds of our life,” Matthew confessed. “It was so quiet and terrifying, and even when the rest of the stunt team comes in and blows them out with fire extinguishers, you’re still just waiting for him to get up and wave to everybody. Once that happened, everybody took a big, deep breath, and we talked to Michaela afterwards and said, ‘Hey, what was that like?’ She was like, ‘It was like staring at a guy on fire. It was terrifying!'”
Even without immolating a stuntman, practical effects were always pivotal in their approach, and not just because of the economic realities the McManus brothers faced in mounting an ambitious, action-packed, dimension-hopping thriller without a lot of budget to work with.
“You get so much bang for your buck in those moments, and the actors are more plugged in, and it’s just more exciting through and through,” Matthew acknowledged, although there are necessary drawbacks. “That also is slow, and, you know, you’ve got armourers on set, the highest paid people on set, because they’re so critical to the whole process, but it is a slower process.”
That led to himself and Kevin being “incredibly pragmatic” in meticulously planning every single shot for the action sequences, which were filmed with one eye on “what the final cut is going to look like, and there’s not much room for extra bells and whistles, so you’re really trying to deliver that on a day so that you get it all up onscreen.”
At various points, Redux Redux deals with sci-fi, a little bit of horror, elements of a thriller, a two-hander between Irene and Mia, a road-tripping caper, and even a hint of the slasher flick in the third act, all wrapped up in a revenge story, which necessitated a tricky tonal tightrope being walked at all times.
“Obviously, it’s a sci-fi movie, but the sci-fi is at arm’s length, in a way that we were hoping audiences would be able to step into this movie at any given scene, if they just walked into the living room while someone was watching it,” Kevin mused of the genre-bending story, which led to some unexpected results after a screening they held for some close friends.
“We had asked them, like, ‘What would you say the genre is?'”, he recalled. “And it was funny, because no one could agree what the genre is. They’re like, ‘Is it horror?’ ‘I mean, it has some horror elements, but not quite’. ‘Is it sci-fi?’ ‘Oh, definitely not.’ Which I thought was hilarious, that almost universally, no one said it was sci-fi. But, you know, there’s a lot of drama here. There’s some comedy in there as well. And then, of course, I think probably the most dominant genre, really, is that it’s a revenge movie with a twist.”
It’s not very often that two brothers write and direct a movie and then cast their sister in the lead, but before anyone can cry nepotism, not only is Michaela McManus an experienced actor with almost two decades of film and television work to her name, but when Kevin and Matthew first started tinkering with the idea that became Redux Redux, she wouldn’t have got the part.
“When we first wrote it, she would have been too young to have a 15-year-old daughter, and so it wasn’t really with her in mind,” the latter noted. After going through “the studio process of chasing after a big talent,” when they decided to make the film themselves, they realised they could cast their “favourite actress,” and “finally show the rest of the world what she can do when she’s put in this kind of a genre.”
“Honestly, as far as pushing the envelope on what we could get accomplished on this movie, it comes down to the fact that you were willing to ask your sister to do things you would never ask another actor,” Kevin expounded, with one particular scene lodged firmly in his memory.
In a sequence where a car blows up in the background, she was serving as an actor, stunt driver, and the camera operator, “making sure she doesn’t turn the car too far away from the exploding car behind her.” They asked a lot of their sister, but having Michaela shoulder multiple burdens “allowed us to just really squeeze the most out of this movie,” which they might not have been able to do if they weren’t related.
Redux Redux‘s big bad is Jeremy Holm’s Neville, who isn’t just responsible for the death of Michaela’s daughter in every timeline she’s visited so far; he also murders her new partner in retribution, Mia, in one of them. That gives them a common goal, and the role was surprisingly easy to cast, even though the basic remit is, ‘We’re going to kill you over and over again, and then when you’re not being killed, you’re being unspeakably evil’.
“Who are we gonna ask to play this absolutely sinister character who’s so horrible and is literally there to get killed over and over and barely has any lines till the end of the movie?” was the obvious question Kevin needed answered. Fortunately, they’d worked with Holm on their previous feature, The Block Island Sound. Much to their terror, though, he ended up going a touch method.
“He got so into it so quick, where he would start writing us fucked up poetry in the voice of Neville, that honestly, like every day we get a new one, three or four days into it,” he reflected. “‘Really, you have to keep these to yourself, I can’t keep reading these!’ He also told us at one point that he had shared with his daughters, and he told them, ‘I think this is the worst guy I’ve ever played’. And they’re like, ‘That’s not possible’, because he’s played so many great villains.”
Holm became “the scariest guy onscreen and the loveliest guy in person,” with Matthew appreciating the hard work he put into getting into Neville’s mindset, fucked up poetry aside, because he “brings this realism to it that wasn’t always on the page.” Presumably, his in-character prose won’t be getting pinned to anyone’s fridge anytime soon.
From ominous villains to iconic heroes: the McManus brothers have been obsessed with James Cameron’s The Terminator for as long as they can remember, calling the film their North Star. Naturally, as an ass-kicking hero set in motion by temporal trickery, Redux Redux has been paid some of the highest compliments they could have ever imagined.
“I mean, there’s nothing more fun than hearing your sister get compared to Sarah Connor, one of the greatest bad-asses of all time,” Kevin smiled.
“For us, the original Terminator is such a sweet spot, because it’s so simple. In a lot of ways, it plays out more like a horror film than a sci-fi film, and, again, the sci-fi is at arm’s length, and you’re telling a really cool human, personal story all at the same time.”
“That’s definitely an itch we’ve always wanted to scratch, and getting to do it with this movie, set in the same city and capture that same LA crime vibe was something that was really exciting to us.”
Kevin McManus
Nine years elapsed between the McManus brothers’ debut feature, the coming-of-age story Funeral Kings, and their sophomore effort, Netflix’s Lovecraftian thriller, The Block Island Sound. Only four have passed between then and Redux Redux, and as you’d imagine, they want those gaps to continue growing shorter.
“You better believe it!” Matthew declared. “We always say we’re going to make a movie every couple of years, and then we’re horrified to see how long it actually takes. But I very much hope we’re on set much quicker than the last gap!” If and when that happens, expect some form of genre undercurrent.
After all, in addition to their three features, the siblings have been part of the writing staff for the smash hit Karate Kid sequel series, Cobra Kai, and earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for writing ‘Clean Up’, the eighth and final episode of the Netflix mockumentary American Vandal‘s first season, adding martial arts, nostalgia-fuelled legacy series, and comedy to their repertoire.
“We’ve always been in love with genre,” Kevin confirmed, not that he had to. “Sci-fi thrillers are something that always scratches a certain itch, and horror movies are something that scratches a certain itch. For us, we’re horror movie junkies, and we haven’t really dipped our toe into, I think, a full-fledged horror movie, but I think that’s something that we’d definitely love to do.”
If there’s one sci-fi thriller that would scratch the ultimate dream itch, you can probably infer what it is. “If we ever got our hands on the Terminator franchise, that would be pretty great, if I could snap my fingers and make anything happen,” Matthew said, as his brother nodded in full agreement.
“That feels like a hard one to get,” he clarified. “Yeah, that feels like a good genie’s wish.” With James Cameron continuing to tease another instalment in the long-running series and already distancing himself from the director’s chair, who’s to say that the McManus brothers’ wildest dream won’t come true?
