By the end, though, I knew that I would watch it again and again in all seasons of my life.

The acting performances are stunning, with notable turns by Anne Hathaway and Zendaya in particular. Matt Damon plays such a tortured, kinetic Odysseus that you forget, by the end, that he is Matt Damon. Tom Holland is well cast as Telemachus. Robert Pattinson, as one of Penelope’s many suitors, brings to mind a kind of serpentine Elon Musk.

The music, too, deserves notice. The composer working on the film recreated ancient instruments to build a soundscape both authentic to its era and that will, as many Nolan movie soundtracks have, redefine our own.

Like most Nolan films, the Odyssey explores themes of love and loyalty across distance and time, its structure is incomprehensible until it becomes inevitable, and it ends with the hero sailing into the proverbial sunset with Anne Hathaway. It feels like the perfected form of a story that Nolan first developed across Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, and its propulsive ending sounds uncannily similar to the latter of these projects. But most of the similarities end there.

Though Nolan’s Batman movies were beloved by a certain genre of punisher-tatted vigilante wannabe, his latest work has been subject to widespread calls for boycotts by right wing figures over its casting decisions, but its diversity feels more authentically Mediterranean than a cast made up of blonde men with blue eyes. Much has been made of Elliot Page’s role in the Odyssey, as has become traditional in some corners of our society whenever a trans person is involved with much of anything except pornography. In truth, his casting is both less pivotal than the fears of the trans-obsessed, and a masterclass in trans inclusion: Nolan needed an actor to play a character loyal to Odysseus, too young and small to have been dragged to war, and Page fit the bill. The bar in the age of political campaigns against they/them may be in the basement, but it’s refreshing to see it cleared either way. The world of the Ancient Greeks spanned continents and cultures - the poet Ovid described Scythian Priestesses who removed the male genitals they’d been born with, an invincible male hero who’d been born a woman, and a blind prophet whose lives as both made them uniquely equipped to serve as a judge of disputes about the sexes - and you feel that as you watch this film. Page, and Lupita Nyong’o’s chilling Helen, are simply part of the world. Their inclusion in the cast is both the modern right’s biggest fear, and a hopeful indicator of where our culture has already moved after the woke revolution and counterrevolution of the turbulent past decade.

While the story of Odysseus is now more than 3,000 years old, this is a movie with strong opinions about the state of the American Empire. It is one of the most visceral pieces of anti-war media I have ever seen, and it takes specific aim at the particular form of cultural rot best embodied by Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees. The antagonists in the film are gluttonous, undisciplined, delighted by the weakening of norms of courtesy, menacing towards women and comically cruel towards their lessers. Their comeuppance is as satisfying as their behavior is difficult to watch. When one particularly rancid specimen takes an arrow to the neck in a way that evokes modern parallels to one particularly high profile political assassination, the crowd in my screening applauded wildly. Sitting in a packed IMAX theater, I found myself yearning for a restoration of virtue as one of the cornerstones of a society that does not heap scorn on the poor, the frail, and the elderly - a society where even a newly-arrived beggar, made weak by time and fate but strong in will, could hope for an audience with the Queen.

All of this is to say that the Odyssey is, in a way I did not expect, a story about love. About how, having found the one person who can string your recurve bow, there is no second-best option, no going back, no moving on, nothing to do but to fill the yawning chasm of their absence as best you can, in a body with half of a heart. The romance between Odysseus and Penelope survives twenty years of longing because both of them know beyond a shadow of a doubt that their lover is the person who coaxes their best out of them. In the New Testament, written eight centuries after this story, the prodigal son returns home and is greeted with love without precondition on account of his blood. In the Odyssey, love is the role for which you continually audition (a thesis it happens to share with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders). Love is knowing that though your partner may weep with longing for the Sirens and spend seven years eating lotus flowers from the hand of Calypso, when they once again pass your threshold, wooden limbs and twine will yield to the strength of their hands alone, and the string will hum once more. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. Love always comes home.

But what the movie actually does resists a poster. Again Again is the best film about the pandemic I’ve seen, and it is the truest film about the first few years of transition I’ve seen. One film, doing both. I’m not going to spoil how it gets there — partly because the reveals deserve protecting, and mostly because the plot is the least of what you carry out of the theater.

What you carry out is a feeling, and the feeling stuns. The screening I went to sold out — SIFF ran three showings — and the cinematography earns it. Moore and co-director Heather Ballish light the film with a warmth that kept stopping me, a nostalgia for the era when studios still let movies look like places instead of plates. There is a church scene — red glass, the altar windows reflected — that did something to me I’m still thinking about.

A sequence called “Duet” is the high point of the film. The casting of the leads’ younger selves works without a visible seam. And the score — Moore co-composed it with Chloe Iris, with original music from Ekko Astral, the trans punk band fronted by Jael Holzman — is the rare indie score that stands out instead of washing past. The whole thing feels lived-in, set in an actual world, which counts for something: so much trans independent film is stuck in the claustrophobic register of people who couldn’t afford a second room. This one breathes.

And it breathes transition. Not the part the movies always choose — not the self-discovery, not the first hormones, not the reveal. Again Again lives in the mess that comes after the decision and before the peace: the difficulty of breaking an old habit, the vertigo of watching your own memories get rewritten while everyone around you keeps you filed under the previous version.

A time loop turns out to be the perfect machine for that feeling. You move back through your own life and it has changed, and the people in it haven’t updated, and the loneliness of that gap is the entire film. “Why do I have to be so fucking high all the time,” Aggie asks at one point. It lands less as a plot point about drugs than as the question anyone asks about whatever they’re still using to get through the day.

Moore has said the film grew out of her own agoraphobia during the COVID lockdowns, and you can feel that history in every frame without the film once announcing it.

Like Moore, I decided to transition immediately before COVID, and then the lockdown shoved me back inside — into many of the exact constraints I thought I had just walked out of. That timing carries a specific cruelty that is hard to explain to people who didn’t live it: you finally start, and the world makes you start over, alone, on a loop. Moore knows it because she lived it. That is what lets Again Again work as a pandemic movie that never needs the news footage. It has the feeling instead.

The emotional engine of the film is a resentment that shouldn’t make sense — a woman who bristles at the person who loves her most, in a movie otherwise full of tenderness and laughing and the easy chemistry of two people who plainly delight in each other. The film takes its time letting you understand it, and when it does, it hands you the best line in the picture. “You might be the kind of person who gets to have things,” Aggie tells Tess, “and I’m not.”

That line names the wound: the conviction that love and safety and a future are things other people get, and that loving someone who gets to have things only sharpens the sense that you don’t. The film tells the truth about how that curdles. It also tells the truth about the only way out, which turns out to be faith rather than understanding. We will never really know each other, the movie finally decides; we can only choose to believe each other anyway. Trust is a leap, not a conclusion.

It has flaws, and I don’t think Moore would want me to pretend otherwise. An early hostility between the leads asks you to hold a discordant note longer than feels comfortable, and trusts the payoff to justify it — which it mostly does. And I wanted more of what made Tess fall for Aggie in the first place. The movie treats that love as a given, maybe on purpose — from the inside, love does arrive unexplained — but it left me wanting the evidence.

Abigail Thorn, the actor behind Philosophy Tube, is a bright spot. Her Naomi is cheeky and quirked-up and pulls a lighter register out of Moore’s Aggie than anyone else in the film gets to, and the audience howled at her line readings. A movie this saturated in longing needs somebody who knows where the jokes are. Thorn keeps finding them.

Moore made this thing the way she makes everything — openhandedly, with an earnestness that reads almost defiant in a mean and cynical time. She wrote it, co-directed it with Ballish, stars in it, co-composed the score, and shot it in her hometown of Aberdeen with a crowdfunded budget and a producer roster that includes Lilly Wachowski, who also kicked $5,000 into the crowdfunding campaign herself. Moore is the person who popularized “if you want to be a girl you can just be a girl,” and the movie is made of the same stuff: no irony tax, no protective cool.

The comps are easy to reach for and none of them fit. Memento by way of I Saw the TV Glow by way of Bo Burnham’s Inside, with the DNA of ’90s cinema and anime and Life Is Strange — and somehow none of them, because all of them chase spectacle and this one chases a feeling.

There’s a moment late in the film — I won’t say which — where the laughing finally outlasts the dread, and the two women just get to crack each other up. “Have fun being straight or whatever,” one of them says, and the whole theater laughed the laugh of people who got to leave the worst of it behind them. That laugh is the gift of Again Again, rarer than another coming-out story: it films the long, ugly middle nobody films, and it promises — quietly, without insisting — a peace on the far side. You only have to decide to believe it. The movie has already decided for you.

Again Again premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in May.

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