How Two Indie Directors Made The Coolest Multiverse Movie Of The Year

When Kevin and Matthew McManus conceived of Redux Redux, a lean and mean revenge thriller about a grieving mother named Irene (Michaela McManus) who travels infinite parallel universes to seek revenge against the killer of her daughter, the multiverse was barely a glimmer in Marvel Studios’ eye. Everything Everywhere All at Once was still six years away from winning Best Picture at the Oscars, and general audiences couldn’t even conceive of “multiverse fatigue.”

It was a decade ago when the sibling directing duo, best known for their work on Netflix shows Cobra Kai and American Vandal, first began working on Redux Redux. And in the years since, the multiverse has gone from novel idea to next great thing in Hollywood to tired gimmick. “We rode that whole thing,” Matthew McManus tells Inverse.

“When we were first coming up with this idea 10 years ago, there [weren’t] that many parallel universe movies and shows out there, and so it felt like an exciting subgenre to dive back into and remind audiences of,” McManus adds. “And sure enough, after we wrote it, it really took off and has become so ubiquitous.”

“So many multiverse stories feel like they’re taking advantage of how wild the worlds can get.”

But the idea of using the multiverse conceit in a revenge thriller was still fairly unheard of. So the McManus brothers stuck to their guns and were finally able to bring Redux Redux over the finish line, premiering the film at the 2025 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival, where it was met with universal praise. And despite the fatigue that general audiences are feeling for anything multiverse, Redux Redux manages to feel fresh, shocking, and completely novel. It’s a taut, original take on the sci-fi revenge movie, one that makes you forget that you ever felt tired of multiverse stories. “Luckily, people seem to be OK with it so far,” McManus says wryly.

Inverse spoke with Kevin and Matthew McManus about the challenges of making a low-budget multiverse movie, how Terminator inspired them, and why they never even considered time travel.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I watched the movie, and it’s such a good, tight little thriller with a fun, high-concept premise. Where did the idea for Redux Redux come from?

Kevin McManus: I think it really came from a desire to try and tell a multiverse story in a more personal and intimate way. So many multiverse stories feel like they’re taking advantage of how wild the worlds can get. How do we tell fantastical stories within the multiverse scope? We kept wondering: “What would the opposite of that look like? What if in an infinite amount of universes, the changes between them are just infinitely small? How frustrating would that be to someone who’s trying to change their circumstances, traversing a multiverse, trying to find a world where their circumstances were different, where something they regretted was different?” Of course, in this case, we try to dial it up as far as possible with a parent losing their child. Seeing how every universe is so identical, what would that do to their humanity? What would that do to their drive? And, of course, it sends Irene on a violent path.

The setup for this movie, it feels like it could have gone in almost a time-travel direction. For this premise, most people would be like, “Oh, yeah, she has a machine. She’ll go time-travel and kill him again.” Why parallel universes instead?

Matthew McManus: It was our way in, in a lot of ways. When we were first coming up with this idea 10 years ago, there [weren’t] that many parallel universe movies and shows out there, and so it felt like an exciting subgenre to dive back into and remind audiences of. And sure enough, after we wrote it, it really took off and has become so ubiquitous. But it also felt like a subgenre where the rules can be really simple and you don’t actually have to complicate it too much. Time travel, you can really run into so many paradoxes. It can be a tricky thing to navigate. I think that was really exciting for us is you get a lot of the fun that you get with time travel without all of the messy complications.

You talked about how this movie has been 10 years in the making. How different is the final product from what you originally started working on all those years ago?

MM: Honestly, it’s remarkably similar. A few moments that we had to change for the budget. But the nice thing was that we didn't have to sacrifice too many of the set pieces and the things we wanted to do. We just had to execute them and make sure that we didn’t blow up three or four cars instead of just the one. There’s a few changes. There was one change in the middle where they run to the smugglers. They used to be at a flea market. And the idea was there’s some box truck in the middle of this flea market, and you’re like, “What are these people even selling?” And they bring you into the box truck, and they have this clandestine meeting. But that’s one of those things that would’ve been really cool, but would’ve been a fortune for the production design and all the extras and to try to make it work.

A desert was a much less expensive version of that. There were a couple of tweaks like that, where it was like you’re not going to lose much of the spectacle by making those changes. We still got to do all the shoot-outs and all sorts of other things. We added some things actually, as we’re going to production. But the man on fire was never in the script. But it felt like that would be a great way to open it. And so we were really lucky. We had a really great team behind us, and we really didn’t have to sacrifice too much.

“Now, audiences know the rules. They know what the multiverse is.”

Did you find that, in the long journey to getting this film made, there was a tide shift in the way that multiverse movies started to be perceived in Hollywood that made it easier to get it made?

MM: There’s a crest. When a genre takes over, the zombie genre was there for 10 years. And for a minute there, everybody goes, “Hey, these things are doing well. Hey, these things are great. We should all get behind this.” And then eventually goes over the crest and people go, “I am so tired of that subgenre.” We rode that whole thing, and then we’re like, “I hope people are still going to be willing to watch this movie.” But luckily, people seem to be OK with it so far.

Like you said, the multiverse is becoming trendy almost nowadays. How do you tackle this concept in a fresh and innovative way, when Everything Everywhere All at Once won Oscars for it and every other Marvel movie is doing it?

KM: One of the ways is trying to keep the story much smaller, but in another way, the convenient thing about it becoming so ubiquitous was that now audiences know the rules. They know what the multiverse is. You don’t have to educate them on that. There used to be a whole monologue describing what the multiverse was and how it worked, and then everything that went into the machinations of it. In a great way, we’re able to strip all that out and take all that exposition out because the audience using context clues is going to be able to figure it out and already know the rules immediately.

Was there a temptation to go bigger with the world-building, expand the lore of this agency that helps people travel between the multiverses?

MM: It’s something we certainly geek out on and talk about, and we think this could be really cool and that could be really cool. But whenever we’re trying to tell these stories, we’re trying to make sure that it's as character-forward as possible. And a lot of that is stripping out and killing your darlings and making sure that all of that lore is a bit at arm’s length. Because as an audience member, those are the movies that I connect with the most. That was a big discussion we would have along the way. There’s a section in the middle of the movie that gives you the most glimpses into the lore and stuff we’ve messed around with. But it was all by design to try to keep it very clean and accessible for an audience.

The fact that each universe has very minimal differences — was that something that was within the original plan or the treatment for the movie, or was that something that came out because of budget reasons?

MM: Yeah, really, it was part of the plan all along. It felt like an exciting way to tackle this. We just kept thinking if there’s an infinite amount of universes, then there would be so many that would be remarkably similar and how frustrating that would be. If you have this technology and you can’t find that one change you’re looking for, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. That would actually make the journey just so much more brutal. It was just an exciting thing.

We like science fiction. It feels really grounded. The Terminator is our North Star. We love that. If you just turn on The Terminator in the middle of the movie, you might think it’s an L.A. noir movie for 20 minutes before you realize his face is falling off and there’s a robot underneath there.

As I was watching this movie, my mind went to Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which I think is the quintessential revenge thriller done in a very creative way with its alternating timelines and flashbacks. Were there any other movies, apart from Terminator, that inspired Redux Redux?

KM: Totally. I think the other big one that we really referenced quite a bit was Blue Ruin. A great revenge flick. What we love about it is, a great deal, the first 30 minutes of that movie, so much of it’s said without any dialogue at all. It’s really the camerawork and the staging and the process the character is going through that tells you that whole story. It was really a fascinating thing to look at, how just camerawork alone and how really great staging can do the heavy lift. And then you can know exactly what the main character is doing at any given time throughout that, just by virtue of where they’re bringing the camera.

I think the central duo of Irene and Mia is great and adds a lone wolf and cub dynamic to the movie after being a very straightforward revenge thriller. What was important to you about fleshing out this dynamic and making that central to the movie?

KM: I think it works on two different levels. On the one level, it very much speaks to the theme of the movie of what Irene is going through, giving her this surrogate daughter relationship and one that’s not exactly warm and cozy all the time. But it’s a teenage daughter where you’re dealing with that and you have to mother her in some ways. But on the other hand, it’s also that character we have a lot of fun with.

I think if we were just with Irene the whole time, the movie could get really grim really fast. It was Mia’s character that came in that I think really started to give it a little bit of a lift and give our audience a bit of a break from how morose the story really could have gone into. It works on that device level of trying to find out places where we can lighten things up. But also pretty central to Irene’s story for sure.

“We’re crazy about sci-fi tech that looks beat-up.”

I want to ask about the design of the machine. It’s very simple, like an industrial-looking coffin. Where did the idea for the design come about?

MM: We’re crazy about sci-fi tech that looks beat-up. It’s got a million miles on it. I think it’s anybody who watched Back to the Future and saw the DeLorean or watched Star Wars and saw the Millennium Falcon, you’re like, “That’s what she wants. It feels mechanical and crummy, and it’s just the best you could do.” That was the hope was to come up with our own design that felt like that. In the script, it was referenced as something between a coffin and a refrigerator. And then we were talking to our production designer and our art director, trying to come up with what it was going to be. And we did this way in advance of shooting the movie. It was months and months we knew this was going to be the central piece to the movie.

They were asking us questions about it. And then Kevin was like, “I think the best way to describe this is maybe to just make a silly version with balsa wood.” He carved this thing up and spray-painted it and showed them this little, almost like a toy version of it. I was like, “This is overthinking, a little hand carve on the back of it, that whole 9 yards.” He’s like, “All right, I get it. I know what you want.” Him and Stephen Dudro, his art director, came together and 3D built... a prototype of what it could look like, and then built it for real. And we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

And the biggest effect is when the machine goes off, sending everyone in the vicinity flying back. Was that the biggest technical challenge for you on this film?

MM: In a lot of ways. It was definitely one that we were trying to get. It’s described in the script as an implosion, which is hard to articulate on screen because everything would be going... The trick of exploding out is certainly easier. I think we imagined it like a bit of a cyclone on set, where it goes out one way, it comes in the other way. When the police officer is at the door, and it goes off, he gets sucked in towards where the thing disappeared. And then, of course, beyond that, it appears in the next universe. That was one of the more fun things to try to design a way for it to drop on its own and have a little explosion happen. Our special effects guy built hydraulics into the machine itself so he could lift it up and then drop it down, and he’d let a little squib go off to give us a little flash bang.

It was so much fun to do it in real life that he’d set it all up, and it would look like a low rider on hydraulics coming up. Eventually, it gave out, and it broke, right at a critical time when we’re running out of time and needed it to work again. You go from the hydraulic method, which is high-tech and cool to... big Dixie cups with fishing line under it. We gently put it on these little Dixie cups, which would hold it up, and then the fishing line would collapse the Dixie cups, and bam, it would fall. Honestly, I think those even look better than the hydraulics.

KM: And the machine is ridiculously heavy. It was inspired. He’s like, “It’s funny if you stand on these things just perfectly, it can hold your weight. And so I’ve got a good feeling this is going to work.” I don’t think anybody believed him, and he did it. And afterwards he took a bow, and everybody's very impressed. It was an impressive physics experiment.

After this movie, what do you have your eye on next? Do you want to continue in the genre field? Or are you going to try going back to comedies like American Vandal, which I really enjoyed your work on, by the way. I’m still mourning its cancellation.

KM: So are we.

MM: I think on the feature side of things, our love is really in the genre space. We’d love to do more genre, certainly granted sci-fi is always playing in the back of our heads. We’d love to do a true-blue horror film. Those are the things I think we’re thinking about a lot lately. Of course, I think the American Vandal guys start up a new show. We would drop everything to do it.

KM: That’s one of the things we're proudest of. I hope both. I hope that very soon you’ll see us doing both of those things again.

Redux Redux is playing now in limited theaters.