Official trailer
Predestination is a clever puzzle in search of a reason to exist.
The temporal loop at its center, a person who’s their own parent, their own child, and their own nemesis, is logically consistent in a way that time travel films rarely achieve. The mechanics work. The problem is that once you’ve admired the mechanics, there’s nothing else. The film is a crossword puzzle: satisfying to complete, immediately forgettable.
My rating: -10. Clever without feeling anything is a kind of disappointment that deserves a strong negative rating in this system. The craft is visible. The purpose isn’t.
What frustrates me most is how close this comes. I spent the whole film admiring the machinery and waiting for it to hurt, and it never quite did.
The Mechanics
The Spierig brothers constructed a temporal loop that’s logically airtight. John is born female as Jane, seduced by a temporal agent and impregnated, gives birth to a daughter who’s stolen by a time traveler and deposited in the past as a baby, the same Jane. John is the father of Jane. Jane becomes John. John is the agent who seduced Jane. The loop is closed. Every element generates every other element. Nothing exists outside the loop.
This is impressive temporal mechanics. Most time travel films create paradoxes they can’t resolve. Predestination resolves all of them by creating a system that’s entirely self-generating, a causal circle with no external input, that bootstraps itself into existence from nothing. The intellectual achievement of designing this system is real.
The problem is that the system is all there is.
Predestination is interested in showing that its loop is closed instead of in exploring what it means to inhabit such a loop. The film acknowledges the emotional implications, of being your own parent, of knowing that the choices you haven’t made yet caused everything you experience, of having no origin outside the system, but doesn’t develop them. It uses Sarah Snook’s exceptional performance to communicate the weight of these implications but doesn’t give her material that explores them beyond the mechanics.
Sarah Snook’s Performance
Sarah Snook’s performance is the film’s most significant achievement and its most significant waste. She plays two distinct tones of the same character, Jane’s vulnerability and John’s accumulated hardness, the woman and the person who became someone else, with complete technical precision and real emotional conviction. The performance communicates what the script doesn’t fully develop: the loneliness of a person who has no real origin, no external reference point, no relationship that predates the loop.
Snook is the reason I’d tell anybody to see it at all. She makes Jane’s vulnerability and John’s hardness feel like one wound, and I kept wishing the script would get out of her way.
If the film had given Snook a script that explored what she was communicating instead of simply showing the loop, it could have been devastating. Instead the script uses her performance as evidence that the emotional implications are present, they’re visible in her face and in her body, without building a story that develops them. She earned more than she received.
Is Predestination as good as people say?
The loop is elegant and Snook is exceptional, and I still came away feeling almost nothing. That gap between the craft and the emotional payoff is the failure the rating reflects, and it stings more than a bad film would, because everything a great one needs is sitting right there on the screen. I want a movie that makes me think and makes me feel, and this one only manages the first.
- Predestination (2014), IMDb
