Genre: Sci-Fi
Director: Nacho Vigalondo
Writer: Seth Overton
Based on the visual novel video game
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Jane Levy, Ben Kingsley, Zoe Saldana, Lily Collins, Jorge Garcia, Noomi Rapace, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Plot: The story follows Kane (Sam Rockwell), a brilliant yet eccentric scientist who suffers from paranoid delusions. Kane thinks he is being pursued by a shadow organization and that the front of that organization is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (SERN).
Kane attends a low-key conference about physics with his assistant and protege Maya (Lily Collins). There, he discovers the body of Christina (Jane Levy) a young redheaded woman murdered in cold blood. He sends a text to his other associate and friend, Harris (Jorge Garcia) a socially awkward deadpanned hacker. After sending the message, he suddenly finds himself in the streets with everyone gone. Maya wakes him up and he finds out that the conference had never taken place because a large satellite crashed in the very building he was earlier.
Furthermore, when attending another conference with Harris, he finds that Christina is alive and well. He confronts her with no tact, telling her she was dead and that he most likely triggered an event that moved him to a different timeline in which she was alive (a favorite time-travel theory of his). She is naturally freaked out and leaves, but later returns to his lab, intrigued by his theory.
Kane's lab is an apartment rented by Mr. Brown (Ben Kingsley) where Maya, Harris and more recently Christina test out different theories. Kane tells Christina that his theory was inspired by a user on a message board named "John Titor" who claimed to be from the future. The user confirmed Kane's fears about SERN. He writes that after they discover time-travel they become world leaders and support a tyrannical regime across the globe. He notes that he needs a retro computer (the IBN 5100) to decrypt a key that would allow him into their servers in order to stop them from discovering time travel.
During the experiments, Kane finds out that the event that triggered the time jump was the text message he sent to Harris. He discovers that a change he made to his phone made it possible to send text messages into the past which he calls D-mails.
Kane experiments with D-mails altering the timeline either in subtle ways (previous shops not being present where they usually were) or in more surprising ways (Sam (Noomi Rapace), a friend of Maya is gender-swapped between timelines).
One seemingly ordinary day at the lab, Kane and his friends are attacked by a group of masked men led by Alice (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) a SERN agent. Maya dies in the encounter. He goes back in time multiple times in order to save Maya, but with no success. He is then contacted by Serena (Zoe Saldana) who tells him that Alice is in fact Mr Brown's daughter and that Mr. Brown is the leader of SERN. Serena is "John Titor" the user from the message board who his from the future. He came in the present using the device that crashed into the conference building in order to retrieve the IBN 5100 and trigger an event that would change timelines drastically, hopefully to a timeline in which SERN does not become an all-ruling malevolent entity and Maya is still alive.
After they retrieve the IBN 5100, Christina is captured by Mr. Brown who threatens to kill her if they do not give up the computer. Kane manages to save her and they share an intimate kiss, but later finds out from Serena that the only way to save Maya and the world is to return to the original timeline, the one in which he found Christina dead and that she was the one who killed her in that timeline because her research into time-traveling was instrumental for SERN's rise to power.
Trying to save her would be futile since it would trigger another timeline change. So he comes up with a plan to fool his past self into thinking she was dead so that everything would happen as usual and the timeline change would not be triggered. He would also destroy all her research so that SERN does not invent time-travel in this timeline, just as originally intended by Serena. He uses Serena's device to physically time-travel into the past, making sure to avoid his past self because of time paradoxes.
There, he finds Mr. Brown talking with Christina about her time-travel research and offering her a SERN scholarship. Before Kane could destroy her research, she burns it herself in front of Mr. Brown, telling him she had a dream that the world would be a better place without it. Mr Brown leaves disappointed and Kane knocks her out so that his past self would find her.
The timelines resets. Kane realigns with his past self. He is walking through a crowded space. He sees a redheaded woman that seems familiar to him. A feeling of deja-vu. The woman notices him as well. He goes up to him: "You. I think I saw you in my dream." Cut to black.
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