- UK release: February 2015
- Director: Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig · Writers: Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig
- Studio / distributor: Screen Australia; Blacklab Entertainment; Wolfhound Pictures (Stage 6 Films)
- Source: Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 short story “‘All You Zombies’”
- Genre: Science-fiction time-travel thriller · Runtime: 97 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Ethan Hawke (Before Sunrise, Training Day) as the Barkeep; Sarah Snook (Sleeping Beauty) as the Unmarried Mother; Noah Taylor (Shine) as Mr Robertson; Madeleine West as Mrs Stapleton
- IMDb: 7.4 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 83% critics / 75% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Time-travel cinema usually fails in one of two ways. It either keeps the rules so loose that nothing has weight, or it ties itself in such knots that you spend the closing reel doing homework instead of watching a film. Predestination comes from the Spierig brothers, the Australian pair who gave us the underseen vampire thriller Daybreakers, and it is adapted from one of the most famously self-swallowing short stories in the genre, Heinlein’s “‘All You Zombies’”. The surprise is not that they attempt it. The surprise is how calm and controlled the result is, and how much of its running time is two people talking at a bar.
The setup
Ethan Hawke plays a temporal agent nearing the end of a long career spent jumping through decades to stop crimes before they happen. His unfinished business is a serial bomber who has eluded the Bureau for years and is due to kill hundreds in 1970s New York. Working a bar undercover, he falls into conversation with a writer who has lived an extraordinary life, and that life story, told across the counter, turns out to be wound tightly around the case he cannot close. To say much more is to start pulling threads the film would rather you discover in order, so I will leave the plot at this: an investigation, a confession, and a loop that closes with unusual precision.
The cast
Hawke is the steady anchor, world-weary and watchful, doing the kind of patient listening that holds a long dialogue scene together. He has always been good at men carrying private fatigue, and he leans on it here. The film, though, belongs to Sarah Snook, an Australian actor largely unknown outside her home industry, who is handed one of the most demanding parts a young performer could be given and never drops it. The role asks for transformation across years and across far more than years, and Snook makes every stage of it a recognisable, wounded human being rather than a puzzle piece. It is the sort of performance that makes a career, and it is wholly deserved. Noah Taylor, decades on from Shine, lends the Bureau scenes a quiet, bureaucratic menace.
The craft
The Spierigs shoot on a modest budget and hide it well. Ben Nott’s cinematography gives 1970s New York a warm, lived-in grain, and the period detail, all bar-room browns and analogue tech, is convincing without showing off. The score, written by Peter Spierig himself, broods rather than swells, which suits a film built on conversation rather than chase. Crucially, the directors trust the talk. Long stretches are simply two people exchanging a story, and the editing lets those scenes breathe, then tightens hard when the time-jumping kicks in. The temporal mechanics are kept deliberately low-tech, a violin case that folds space, which keeps the focus on people rather than gadgetry. At ninety-seven minutes it does not overstay, and the discipline shows.
How it stacks up
This is a strong year for clever time travel, and Predestination sits comfortably in good company. It shares the closed-loop fatalism of Source Code and the small-scale rigour of Primer, but it is warmer than either, more interested in a single damaged life than in the diagram. Set it beside Looper, which married its paradoxes to gunfights and spectacle, and Predestination looks almost austere by comparison, a chamber piece where the other was an action film. The closest cousin is really 12 Monkeys, another story about an agent trapped inside the very thing he is trying to prevent. Where lesser films of this kind cheat, Predestination plays fair, laying its clues in plain sight and trusting you to assemble them.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it, sitting around 83%, with most of the praise pointed at the structure and at Snook. Audiences are a little cooler at 75%, and you can see why the split exists. This is a film with a central conceit that some viewers will see coming and others will find airless once the trick is understood. If you treat it purely as a riddle to be solved, the destination can feel foregone. The reading I prefer is that the loop is not the gimmick but the tragedy, a story about a person with no way out of their own life, and on that level it lands harder on a second viewing than a first.
Verdict
I am the natural audience for this. Intelligent science fiction that respects its source, builds a watertight internal logic and rewards a rewatch is exactly my register, and Predestination delivers on all three. It is small where it could have been showy, and its restraint is its strength. The one mark against it is that the puzzle is so tightly engineered that the human warmth occasionally has to fight for room, and a viewer who cracks the structure early may feel the film coasting to a conclusion it has already signalled. None of that stops it being the most satisfying time-travel film I have seen in some time, and one I will happily run again to watch the seams line up. 8⁄10.
Availability: In selected UK cinemas now, and arriving on DVD and Blu-ray shortly after. A film that plays beautifully a second time, so it is well worth owning.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Sarah Snook went on to international fame as Shiv Roy in Succession (2018 to 2023), which sends a steady stream of new viewers back to this film, and rightly so, since it remains the clearest early showcase of her range. The Spierig brothers reunited with Hawke’s tonal world by taking on the Saw franchise with Jigsaw (2017), to far less interesting effect. Predestination has settled into a deserved cult reputation as one of the smartest time-travel films of its decade, regularly recommended alongside Primer and Coherence. It is now widely available on disc and streams on the usual rental platforms.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, sex, strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Strong violence includes a blood spurt from a bullet impact, and a scene in which a man is set on fire by a bomb explosion, after which his skin is seen to be burnt. There is a fight with some crunchy blows, including to the face.
Language: Multiple uses of strong language (‘f**k’), as well as various uses of milder bad language, including ‘shit’ and ‘son of a bitch’.
Sex: A naked man thrusts into a bare breasted woman. There are also verbal references to sex as women are interviewed about their sex lives.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
