We get underway with a woman standing in a desert. At her feet is a man tied tightly to a chair. The chair has been tipped over. The man is on fire, howling in agony. The woman looks on expressionlessly. She might be watching a chess match.

"Redux Redux" is a sci-fi thriller of the multiverse variety, but don't scamper off. Unlike some of the old big-budget iterations of this concept, in which everything was possible and therefore not all that interesting, "Redux" is a more soulful exploration of what might happen if humans could be cut loose from their mortal timelines and set adrift to rewrite the days of their lives. In this universe, those endless days are all available for reliving, each of them different — but not entirely, which is the tricky part. Just when you think you've got the hang of what's happening in your latest world, somebody might walk up and ask, "Are you dead?" Would you even know?

The movie was written and directed by indie siblings Kevin and Matthew McManus ("The Block Island Sound"), who have the good fortune to be younger brothers of actress Michaela McManus, who stars in this, their third feature. Michaela's credits are largely in television (from "One Tree Hill" to "Memory of a Killer") but she's a strong, earthy presence and takes quiet control of her scenes.

Michaela plays Irene Kelly, the bonfire lady we encountered at the opening of the film. Irene has been making her way around the multiverse, from one world to the next to the next, in search of the man who kidnapped and murdered her daughter, Anna, many years ago. She ferries around on her travels in a coffin-shaped contraption that's not entirely unlike the interdimensional phone booth commanded by Doctor Who. She's on the trail of a scumbucket called Neville (Jeremy Holm), who's in desperate need of killing. Actually, she's already caught and killed this guy more than once (we get a bloody closeup of his throat being slit in one previous encounter), but no matter how many times she kills him, he's still alive in some other world afterward. This is driving her nuts.

Irene's life is complicated in weird ways. Like her experience with a straight-arrow kind of guy named Jonathan (Jim Cummings). We see her bumping into him as they're both heading into an AA meeting. He's very sweet. She asks if she can buy him a drink. She can. They head for a bar. Then they head out to his car to have sex. We figure Jonathan must be feeling pretty lucky until Irene lets him know that they've done this before — all of it: the ditched AA meeting, the bar, the car, the sex. "We've met and fucked hundreds of times in different parallel universes," she tells him. "It's the closest thing I have to a monogamous relationship."

Irene's exhausting jog on the existential hamster wheel eventually connects her with a magnificently sour 15-year-old girl named Mia Brown (the excellent Stella Marcus), a battered product of the government foster-care system. Mia is on the hunt for something, too, and she's inspired by Irene's determination in her own search. Like the way she communicates through classified ads with an underground (literally) repair shop for her malfunctioning coffin-mobile. ("This is some 'Bourne Identity' shit," Mia says.) And the way she's able to remain unfazed by all the explosions and bullet storms that seem to attend her every move.

There comes a time, one fleeting moment, when things start looking like they might soon start looking better for these two. But then, just when she least needs to hear it, word arrives that Mia's life is in immediate danger. In another universe, of course.

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