Here’s another brotherly duo: Australian genre boys Michael and Peter Spierig, who made 2009 vampire movie Daybreakers. They follow up with an ingeniously baroque time-twister based on Robert A Heinlein’s deathlessly perplexing 1959 short story “All You Zombies”. Predestination is the ultimate man-walks-into-a-bar anecdote, about a guy who agrees to tell a bartender (Ethan Hawke) about his strange life, which began when he was born a girl. Once his story is complete, the film leaps into a dizzy abyss of temporal paradoxes, made all the dizzier by its transgender premise – a modern Tiresias myth plaited into a Möbius strip.
There’s a dash of Borges here, plus a soupcon of war-on-terror currency to update the original. And the Spierigs bring a spiky post-feminist slant to Heinlein’s imagined 1960s, in which the top career option for women is servicing male astronauts. It all makes for heady stuff that should get your synapses sparking. Hawke is dependably frazzled, but the revelation is Sarah Snook. She’s both unsettling and extremely winning as she morphs from vulnerable but tough Jane to hard-bitten, cynical John – and looking, in the latter guise, like Sissy Spacek after several very frosty mornings.
