Time travel never gets old, if you'll excuse the pun. The idea became popular just as movies were invented, through H. G. Wells's 1895 novel, The Time Machine, but the idea of revisiting one's past, or changing the future, is much older. In Predestination, made by the identical twin brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, it becomes an intriguing, if slightly confusing, exercise in the manipulation of ideas about identity.
This is the third film of the German-born, Queensland-raised brothers, who started making films with their father's video camera when they were about 10. The first feature, Undead, was a gleeful and blood-soaked zombie comedy, an homage to the masters of horror, full of spirited invention. They did most of the effects themselves on their home computer, or with buckets of fake blood.
Their second, Daybreakers, made with $US21 million ($22.5 million) from an American studio, gave them name actors. Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe starred in a story where vampires were in the majority and the last humans were in hiding. Daybreakers had more serious ideas, less humour and more ambition, and it did well, with $US50 million in box office.
Predestination continues in that direction: the brothers want to be taken seriously, both as filmmakers and interpreters of the zeitgeist. The effort is not fully successful, being halfway between a genre piece and an art movie, but it's far from dull. It's hard to be youthful and grown-up at the same time. Even Christopher Nolan struggles with that.
That is to some extent a problem of the science-fiction genre. The great science-fiction writers are willing to jump over the cliff, in order to dream of new things. Those who love SF are happy to go with them, but that's not everyone. In this case, the leap into time travel unlocks some intriguing possibilities in terms of story. Ridiculousness is never too far away, but that was already there in Robert Heinlein's original story, penned in a single day in 1959.
Ethan Hawke plays a "temporal agent", one of 11 gifted individuals who jump around in time in order to prevent major crimes; much like in Spielberg's Minority Report, based on a Philip K. Dick story from 1956. The agent's mission is to find a madman, known as the Fizzle Bomber, before he blows up several city blocks in New York in 1975.
Hawke's character, never named, has failed on several previous trips to stop the bomber. Starting again with a new face in 1970, he is a bartender in a down-at-heel Manhattan neighbourhood, when a strange young man offers to tell him a story that will knock his socks off. It begins with the startling words "when I was a little girl …".
The modern viewer has already guessed the gender gap with this character, a writer played by Sarah Snook. He looks convincing as a man, but the voice is female. The Spierig brothers take the story further than Heinlein did, adding the element of terrorism, but they respect the main line of the story, which is about the love story of a man and a woman who are not as they seem.
Casting Snook is the best decision the brothers made. Her performance here is astonishing; nuanced, poised and moving. The potential she showed in the 2012 Australian movie Not Suitable for Children is more than borne out in what is, in effect, a series of characters, not just one. Her range is startling, and Hawke works as a generous support for her star turn. It's probably going to be sold as his movie, but Snook gives the film its considerable emotional impact. That is where the film works best, as a puzzle about gender, reproduction and terror in our times.
★★★☆
Written and directed by the Spierig brothers
Rated MA 15+, 97 minutes
