Mindblown Monday: Predestination Closes a Loop With One Person at Every Point on It
Predestination (2014, Michael and Peter Spierig) follows an agent of a time-traveling law-enforcement bureau on his final assignment before retirement: catch the “Fizzle Bomber,” a terrorist responsible for dozens of bombings across history. His cover is a bartender in 1970 New York, where a bitter columnist who writes under the name “The Unmarried Mother” sits down at his bar and, under a little prodding, tells him the story of his life. Adapted closely from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 short story “‘–All You Zombies–’,” it is the kind of film Mindblown Monday exists for: one whose pieces don’t fully fit together until the very last minutes, and then fit together so tightly that you want to start over.
The Twist
Four of the film’s central characters are the same person. The columnist’s story begins with Jane, an orphan left on a Cleveland doorstep in 1945, who falls for a mysterious man, is abandoned by him while pregnant, gives birth to a girl, and learns during delivery that she is intersex – after which the doctors reassign her as a man, “John,” and her baby is stolen from the hospital. The agent then takes John back to 1963, where John meets and falls in love with Jane, and realizes the man who left her was himself. The agent goes on to steal the baby and leave it on the Cleveland doorstep in 1945. Jane’s child is Jane. Her lover is John, her own future self. And the agent behind the bar is a later, surgically reconstructed John – and the Fizzle Bomber the agent finally tracks down is that same man, older still, whose bombings were meant to prevent worse disasters. The agent shoots him, closing the loop.
The reason this is a rewatch film, and not just a clever reveal, is the groundwork. Early on, the agent is told his reconstructive surgery will leave him looking and sounding different, which explains why the man who sits across the bar doesn’t recognize his own face. In the opening scene, an unseen person helps the burned agent activate his time machine and escape a failed bombing – a helper you never see, and one that, once you know the loop, is easy to read as the man the agent is chasing. And the line Jane says to her newborn (“you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me”) comes back at the end, word for word, in the message the agent records for the person he will eventually become. The film doesn’t dodge the usual objection to a closed time loop, which is that it has no beginning. It leans into it, and the answer it offers – that something orchestrated all of it, and nobody in it can step outside – is where the title comes from.