Like all time-travel stories, this inevitably trips on its own causal illogic – but not before it’s offered you a taste of something genuinely rich and strange, and probably toxic. It is based on a 1958 SF short story by Robert Heinlein and has touches of Philip K Dick. Ethan Hawke is working for a top-secret government unit that specialises in time travel. His job as a special agent is to zoom back in time to try and forestall a serial killer dubbed the “Fizzle Bomber” (due to the slow-action fuse of his explosive devices) at various stages of his long, notorious career. But while posing as a barman in 1970, Hawke comes across a mysterious trans character (Sarah Snook) with an extraordinary story to tell him. He figures this could be a vital recruit, and their destinies and histories are to be intertwined in headspinning ways. The counterfactual black humour is dizzying, and the movie is, to use Hawke’s own term, the snake that eats its own tail.
