Predestination, from Australian directing duo Michael and Peter Spierig, is this year’s mind-bender. The screenplay is a loose adaptation from an American sci-fi short story called “—All You Zombies—“ by Robert A. Heinlein; it takes the labyrinthian plot and fleshes it out into a character driven meditation on human identity, acceptance, and fate. This strength of character in the film could not have been achieved without its breakout star, Sarah Snook, who plays several incarnations of the ever-evolving lead.
The film begins with an unidentified man in a fedora attempting to diffuse a bomb set by the film’s (often referred to but rarely seen) higher villain the “Fizzle Bomber.” The bomb goes off, nearly killing the man, and resulting in the facial reconstructive surgery that turns him into The Barkeep (played by Ethan Hawke). The Barkeep becomes our unreliable narrator as an Agent for the Temporal Bureau, a government operation that uses time-jumping violin cases to retroactively prevent crimes. The Barkeep’s purported mission throughout the film is to defeat the bomber who, in 1975, will kill 11,000 people in NYC.
The Spierig brothers take this beginning time to set up the complicated rules of the world and show a healing Barkeep as he mumbles into tape recorders and squints at newspaper clippings, suffering not only from burns but also from the mental fissures that result from constant “jumping.” This exposition is much appreciated but of little help as the film soon jettisons into an unapologetic cat and mouse (or maybe, cat and cat, or maybe, just mouse) chase, leaving barely enough breadcrumbs to follow along.
We next see The Barkeep working undercover as a bartender in a beautifully designed 1970s bar where he strikes up conversation with an androgynous-looking man who (in a less than artful script device) offers up his life story under the pretense of the “best story you ever heard.” Meet Snook's character, who steals the show in perhaps the longest bar scene you ever saw. The tale, sprinkled with flashbacks that jump handily throughout the decades, showcases Snook’s versatility as she struggles with being the odd duck at her orphanage from which she is recruited to a female space operations program but is rejected because of something on her physical exam.
In college, she falls in love with and gives birth by a man whose face we never see and who soon disappears. In the hospital, she discovers that she has both male and female functional organs but must become 100% male because of complications with the birth. While recovering, someone steals her baby. Feeling rather defeated after all of this, she moves to New York to become John, the advice columnist who writes under the pen-name “Unmarried Mother.” That brings us back to the bar. And this is only the beginning.
It would be difficult for the ending of Predestination to be as climactic as the sum of its parts and indeed it falls short in the last 15 minutes, but the craft of the film alone is well worth a watch. Each time period is skillfully portrayed with accurate costuming and distinctive color patterns that serve a gorgeous overall look, un-intimidated by the film’s ambitious visual range. Snook’s performance explores the isolation of being different with a side of gender switching that, fortunately, is more of a plot point than a character label. It’s a breath of fresh air to see such a twist-heavy plot employed to serve complex character study, and that’s exactly what Predestination does. This time warping, plot muddling, persona hopping film is just fascinating enough to keep you in your seat, even if you have no idea what’s going on.
