Predestination (2014)

**Rare excellent story - you cannot predict whatsoever**
When's the last time you saw a film and could not even come close to predicting the ending.
When's the last time after you saw a film you had to call up your best friends and tell them they have to see this.
When's the last time you had a guest over and asked if they wanted to see a seriously twisted film - you couldn't resist that a near stranger would miss the chance to see this.
If you're in the mood for a mind luck (ie. if fish = lish ^_^) you will not want to pass this up.
Way way fun.
Can be watched - and seriously enjoyed - multiple times --> no small feat these days.

It all starts with a mysterious character setting what looks like a timer, only for something quite unexpected to happen and for that perpetrator to disappear. What's going on? Well, we meet the "Barkeep" (Ethan Hawke) who is the ultimate in crime prevention agents. He uses the temporal vortex to travel back and forth through time trying to identify those who commit heinous crimes and either talk them out of it, or just plan thwart their plans. He's been doing this for quite a while thus far, but his final mission might prove to be his most difficult. There's just one criminal who has continually eluded him and it's the "Unmarried Mother" (Sarah Snook) that he has to ensnare. Now it does take it's time to get going, but it resists the temptation to use it's time travelling theme to bombard us with different scenarios and timelines and gradually focuses us on quite a characterful study of hunter and quarry with lots of probing dialogue. The effectively intimate location provided by his bar - a sort of "in vino veritas" state of affairs works well, too. What's equally clear around half way in that, well, nothing is at all clear. The characterisations blur, the events blur - and that's not the whisky. The plot interweaves their respective chronologies in such a deliberately confusing fashion as to make it impossible to readily discern just who is who or what is what, though at least that does explain why this individual has proven to difficult for "Barkeep" to apprehend over the aeons. It has a very simple, industrial, feel to it and though the visuals are quite potent they don't overwhelm the personalities and both Hawke and an impressive Snook deliver a story that I found myself caring about. If you need your cinema to be structured with beginning, middle and end then this probably isn't for you, but if you can let it wash over you then it's quite an intriguing watch.