“I’m a temporal agent. We prevent crime before it takes place,” explains Ethan Hawke’s character in this handsomely gloomy sci-fi noir. If that calls to mind 2002’s “Minority Report,” the film does boast a similar late-’50s provenance, adapted from a short story by Robert Heinlein (the other’s author was Philip K. Dick).
But “Predestination” is loopier than that Spielberg movie; its plot twists and turns “like a snake eating its tail,” one character remarks, until you’re not sure whether its developments are even plausible in a fictional universe. (Fact-obsessed viewers who enjoy articles picking apart, say, the science of “Interstellar” can probably give this one a miss.)
The plot concerns the intersection of Hawke’s time-traveling assassin and an androgynous young writer who becomes a key player in the quest by Hawke (he’s only billed as The Barkeep) to catch a New York-based serial bomber.
The writer (Sarah Snook, “Jessabelle”) tells the barkeep his story, beginning with a girlhood at an orphanage, careening through a believably chauvinistic 1960s training program for space concubines and concluding with inadvertent gender-reassignment surgery. Along the way, the writer meets a Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor), who recruits unusually gifted candidates for a shadowy agency.
Also in play is “The Fizzle Bomber,” wreaking havoc in late-’70s Manhattan despite having one of the lamest nicknames in villain history. Who is he, and what does he want? The directors, brothers Peter and Michael Spierig (“Daybreakers”), take their time doling out clues about all of their intersecting fates.
Weirder and more contemplative than many of its time-traveling brethren, “Predestination” is a stylish head trip. It also marks Australian actor Snook as one to watch, as she demonstrates some serious gender-bending range.