111 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Lionsgate
Nick and Janine have a perfect marriage. Then her jealous ex starts traveling through time to erase it. The mechanics get in the way of the heartbreak.
Nick Mikkelsen loves his wife Janine. They live in a near future where the wealthy can travel through time and where sudden “timequakes” rewrite the past without warning. Janine’s first husband, Tommy Hambleton, still wants her, and he has the money to go back and edit history until the marriage never happened. John Ridley adapts Robert Silverberg’s short story into a film about jealousy as a weapon and memory as the only proof that a life happened. The idea is strong. The execution buries it.
Leslie Odom Jr. plays Nick as a man clinging to a certainty he can feel slipping. Cynthia Erivo plays Janine with a warmth that the script keeps interrupting. The two actors build a marriage worth saving in the early scenes and then spend the rest of the film separated by plot. Freida Pinto plays Alex Leslie, Nick’s first love, and gives the film its most grounded stretch. Orlando Bloom plays Tommy Hambleton as a smug aggressor without lending the menace any weight. The cast commits, but the structure keeps pulling them apart before the relationships can land.
Ridley directs his own script and shoots the near future as a clean and expensive showroom. The production design signals wealth and not much else. The film leans on a soft, swelling score to carry emotion the scenes have not earned. The editing is the real problem. The timeline resets so often that cause and effect dissolve, and the cuts between erased and restored realities read as confusion rather than vertigo. Ridley wants the audience to feel unmoored, and instead leaves it lost.
The premise asks a real question. If someone could delete your happiest years and leave you a different person, would you still be you? Needle in a Timestack keeps gesturing at that question and never sits inside it. The romance needs room to breathe and the science fiction never stops talking. Odom and Erivo deserve the movie this could have been. What they get is a handsome machine that mistakes complication for depth.