Predestination ****
Dirs: The
Spierig Brothers. Starring: Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, Noah Taylor. Cert 15, 97
min.
Coherence last week, Kumiko, The Duke of Burgundy and Predestination this: gold stars for
anyone who makes it through to The Second
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel without having their brain scrambled like an
egg. Predestination – the Spierig
brothers’ adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies” –
initially seems straightforward enough: a B-movie reframing of all those “guy
walks into a bar” jokes. Caveats, however, apply: the bartender’s a state-trained
time traveller, and – biologically speaking – the guy might not be a guy at
all.
It is, to say the least, complicated. Beamed back to 1970s New York in
the hope of gleaning the whereabouts of a fugitive bomber, the bartender (Ethan
Hawke) is, like us, soon distracted by the lengthy sob story shared by an
androgynous patron (Sarah Snook) on the lookout for the man who took everything
– her child, her internal organs, even her name – from her. Where we’re
heading, spoilers lurk, but the barkeep’s mission will become both secondary to
and tangled up with hers – or his, as was. Like I said: complicated.
When it needs to, Matthew Putland’s supremely flexible production design
zips us from Hawke’s dive bar to crisp, clean Reagan-era NASA hubs and post-War
Ohio’s leafy suburbs. Each dateline is decided by the numbers on a battered
violin case’s combination lock, probably the priciest time-travel device the
Spierigs could afford. Yet there’s rarely any strain on show: as in last year’s
choice B Cheap Thrills, a drip-feed
script draws us in with the hushed, nocturnal dynamic between lonely barflies
before seguing niftily into its anticipated butterfly effects.
Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s
amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they
do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are
burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences. Future viewings will
be required and merited, for towards the centre of this mazy gem, there lies a
radical narrative proposal of which the boundary-testing Wachowski siblings
would doubtless approve: that the roles of knight in shining armour and damsel
in distress may be entirely interchangeable.
Predestination is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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