Genre: Historical/Sci-Fi
Director: J.J. Abrams
Writer: T.F.W. Hallowayne & Willem Mainwright
Based on the novel by Kate Atkinson
Cast: Margot Robbie, Helen Hunt, Gabriel Byrne, Sally Hawkins, Will Poulter, Kiernan Shipka, Alex Lawther, Peter Capaldi, Paul Giamatti, Paul Bettany
Plot: The film opens with Ursula (Margot Robbie) having refreshments with some high ranking military men and none other than Hitler. He flirts with her, and she doesn't disappoint. She has studied him, knows the kind of woman that he likes. She reaches into her handbag to get a handkerchief, but instead brings out a revolver and levels it at Hitler.
A baby is born too early to a woman named Sylvie (Helen Hunt). It is winter and the doctor can't make it to her bedside. Her husband, Hugh (Gabriel Byrne), is in Paris trying to chase down his sister, Isobel (Sally Hawkins). When the baby arrives, the cord is wrapped around its neck. Dr. Fellowes (Peter Capaldi) arrives at the family's manor, Fox Corner, and is able to save the baby and revive her. Sylvie's son young Maurice poked Ursula with a stick, then tried to cover her up with a pile of fallen leaves. Hugh shooed him away and dug Ursula out.
Sylvie has had another child, a boy they've named Edward, but they call him Teddy. They've taken a holiday down by the beach and Sylvie is watching them play by the water's edge while she sits with the baby back on the beach. Sylvie muses about the depth of feeling she has for her children, something she hadn't considered about her own parents. The children return from fishing and experiences Maurice. He has not grown into a nice young boy, but rather a boy bent on destruction. Sylvie muses that she is glad that he is going to be going away to boarding school in the fall.
Pamela (Kiernan Shipka) takes young Ursula out into the surf to swim and pulls Ursula out too deeply into the surf. A large wave crashes over them suddenly, knocking them both off of their feet. Ursula goes under. Then everything goes dark.
June, 1914. A man named Archibald Winton (Paul Bettany), who is at the beach painting seascapes. Pamela drags Ursula into the surf, but Ursula is afraid. Mr. Winton ends up having to drag them out when a wave crashes over them. Sylvie, who'd been reading on the beach further up, hadn't seen anything and is shocked when Winton appears by her blanket with her two little girls who are sobbing and frightened.
Later, at dinner, we learn that Sylvie has taken to keeping chickens in a coop on their property. Most meals involved chicken or eggs in some form or another, as a way to supplement their wartime rations. Maurice taunts the girls telling them that the chicken they are eating is one of their favorites, but Sylvie lies and says that it isn’t.
Later, Sylvie remarks that Teddy’s skin is the same color as Bridget’s had been. The doctor unemotionally tells Sylvie to ‘pray’ as there’s nothing he can do for her. She has a particularly nasty strain of influenza. Sylvie starts to tell him that she doesn’t believe in God, but stops herself. However, if it would help Teddy, then she’s willing to try it. It doesn’t work. Teddy dies. Dr. Fellowes seems irritated at Sylvie’s howls of grief. Hours later, Ursula sees the ‘black wings of the bat’ close around her. She dies, too.
Ursula was sent to see Dr. Kellet (Paul Giamatti) because of her bouts of déjà vu. She says that she’s mostly cured. This is what she tells everyone but in reality she’s not sure that it’s gone. She says that the ‘feelings’ that she gets are like echoes cascading. Dr. Kellet, if anything, has taught Ursula to be more precise with her language, and has taught her, though inadvertently, to disguise her premonitions. She misses the meetings with Dr. Kellet as it was a grown up that gave her his full attention. At their house there are so many children that Ursula feels like the ‘odd man out’ most of the time. Dr. Kellet is the first to introduce Ursula to the idea of reincarnation.
It is Christmastime and the children are gathering and creating decorations for the celebration. Ursula and Teddy take their dog, Trixie, out into the woods looking for holly and mistletoe when Trixie comes across something dead. When the kids arrive they can only see the scant outline of a human body. Teddy runs back to the house for help. The dead body belonged to a young girl of about eight years old. Her teeth had been smashed in prior to death. No one had reported a missing child and it is thought that perhaps she was a gypsy’s child. No one ever identified the girl nor was the murderer caught. There were rumors that ‘terrible things’ had been done to the child. Teddy has nightmares for weeks after the discovery of the body. Ursula doesn’t.
Pamela is accepted into Leeds to study Chemistry and is ecstatic. Ursula begins to feel queasy, but Sylvie says it must be a summer cold. It is Maurice (Will Poulter), who has returned home to visit that notices that Ursula is ‘filling out’. He calls her a heifer. Ursula begins to fear that something is amiss and sneaks over to her friend’s house to look in an encyclopedia about sexual reproduction. She does the math and figures that she must be carrying Howie’s child.
Pamela leaves for college and Ursula goes by train to a private secretarial college. The instructor continues to sexually harass her by stroking her neck as he walks past, or petting the back of her sweater while she is working. Ursula wonders if she is somehow doing something to warrant the unwanted attentions by bad men.
Ursula has moved out of the house and lives in London with a roommate who is seldom there. For Ursula it is a freedom that she relishes. However, it does dawn on her that she really doesn’t have any close friends. She begins to drink. Pamela gets married and settles into wedded bliss.
They have a great afternoon, but it doesn’t last. A boyfriend of Ursula's comes to the door and immediately attacks Ursula accusing her of whoring around with Teddy (Alex Lawther), whom he doesn’t recognize. She loses consciousness, worried about Teddy, who has begun to fight. Darkness falls.
In the next timeline Sylvie is still the loving mother to Ursula. It is a hot summer afternoon and Ursula is sitting under a tree in the yard reading a book. Ursula comes and tells her that it is time for tea and that Aunt Izzie has arrived. They talk for a while, discussing whether Ursula should go to University or not. Sylvie thinks that University doesn’t teach a woman how to be a wife or a mother. Ursula offers that maybe she doesn’t want those things.
Ursula is working in London for the war office. The instructor at Ursula’s college, attempting to sexually harass the female students, is outed by Ursula and all of her classmates. Ursula earns the admiration of all of her classmates and they tell her that she’s such a ‘rebel'. She does well, graduates with honors, and lands a very nice job in the government where she runs her own department.
She and Pamela have a good visit at Pamela’s house. They heard it officially that England will be declaring war the very next day. Ursula finds herself lying in a ruined room, the smell of gas in the air. She is stunned and confused, her mind floats around all sorts of topics and lands, for the most part on a visit from her mother. She misses Izzie who has married a famous playwright and moved to the U.S. to avoid the war. She realizes that her apartment building has been bombed.
In a new timeline, it is Hugh’s 60th birthday and Ursula is catching a ride with Maurice from London back to Fox Corner. The gathering is more a verbal jousting session than anything else and Ursula is glad that Izzie has come to be a part of the celebration (even though she wasn’t particularly invited). When Maurice calls Ursula an old maid, Izzie puts him in his place. Teddy is dating the girl from next door and everyone expects a wedding in the future.
In a new timeline Ursula has moved to an apartment complex that has not be experiencing nearly as many bombings. Suddenly, the air raid siren goes off. Everyone starts heading for the cellar, except one of the tenants who wants to turn back for her knitting. Ursula has a dread feeling and screams at her to stop. Ursula offers to go instead. She dies, again.
In another reset timeline, she makes it to the street just as the bomb hits the building. It knocks her off of her feet. Debris hits her and she loses consciousness. When she comes to, everywhere she looks there is devastation. Two firemen show up with a hose then scream for Ursula to move quickly, the wall behind her is falling. She dies.
It is summertime and Ursula is learning how to shoot a gun. Maurice has decided to teach her how to use a gun. She rather enjoys target shooting and is good at it. Her mother comes to speak with her about her future and Ursula is still determined to go to University. Her mother says that University won’t teach her how to be a wife and a mother. Ursula says that she may not want to be either one. Sylvie tells her she’s being silly
Ursula is gathered with a large group of young women who are waiting along the road to a mountain retreat. They are all hoping for a glimpse of The Fuhrer. Soon he makes an appearance, riding in a black Mercedes. The Fuhrer gives a little salute, and most of the girls swoon. After he has passed by they all make their way back down to the Youth Hostel. Ursula muses about how much these girls like to sing. They sing everywhere they go. Ursula has ended up here because she’s graduated and has decided to make a ‘grand tour’ of Europe, except on a budget. She’s staying with willing families throughout Europe. There is a small incident on the train to Munich. A man tries to push her into the lavatory and rape her, but she continues to struggle and scream and the officers take the man away. She is shown to a better car with all women on it. Later, she hears that a man, whose identity isn’t given, has fallen from the train.
Ursula and several other girls are at the Berghof eating a light lunch, enjoying the scenery. She has befriended a woman named Eva, who is THE Eva Braun, mistress to Hitler. She shares with Ursula that she longs to be a movie star. Adolph has promised to make her a star. Ursula rather doubts that he will make good on his promise.
Ursula learns that a neighbor, a Jewish Professor, has been taken to work in a ‘factory’. She longs to leave the castle and be freed of the endless hours of servitude to the man and his party, even when he wasn’t in residence. She marvels that women seem to swoon over Hitler, when in reality her mother or Izzie. She finds him rather unintelligent and common, though she’s smart enough not to say that to anyone.
Ursula shares that with the British and Americans bombing by day and night, they stayed in the cellars around the clock. She receives word from her sister that Hugh has died, peacefully, while sleeping in the garden at Fox Corner.
She’d tried to leave Germany shortly after they invaded Poland, but without passports and all of the train stations closed, she was stuck. She tried to go to the British Embassy, but they’d already vacated and left for England.
Ursula learns that Hitler has died and wonders about poor Eva, whether she, too, is dead. Meanwhile, her daughter, Frieda, is sick and getting worse and worse. Ursula risks running to the drug store to see if there’s anything that can be offered to help her child. The only thing the pharmacist can offer is a pain pill and two ampules of cyanide. She cradles her child in her arms. She tells her about wonderful days at Fox Corner and about her happy childhood there. When she’s sure Frieda is asleep, she places the cyanide capsule in her tiny mouth, and crushes it. She takes her own, and they die in one another’s arms.
In a timeline reset, Ursula is in London and has volunteered to be part of the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) department. After air raids, she and a team of people would go and try to dig people out of the rubble. She describes the training that all of the wardens must go through, from rescue techniques to first aid. They live in a group in a Methodist Church. She discusses some of the early cases and says that even now, after many, many cases, she still vomits after each one. Most often, they uncover and dispose of bodies, than rescue them.
She visits her family at Fox Corner and finds her mother and father quarreling openly. Sylvie has become a miser with everything and has turned their entire back yard into a chicken farm. She rations out the rations so that they aren’t sure who eats better, the chickens or the people.
October 1940. Ironically, this timeline opens up with Ursula and her friends standing on a rooftop watching the bombardment many miles away across the Thames. Ursula is very aware that while the ‘show’ is spectacular, on the ground it must be spectacularly horrifying.
They are attending Hugh’s funeral and Ursula finds herself put out with her mother’s theatrics. She had been horribly nasty to Hugh during the last few months of his life, so her wailing seems put on to Ursula. Later, the duty of sorting through Hugh’s belongings and disposing of them falls to Ursula. Ursula asks if Izzie wants to come back to London with her.
The air raid siren ends their concert and they run into the streets warning people, then go to their own designated shelter. Later, when they are going to do their job after the bombing is over, she has one of her dread feelings wash over her. They start digging out a building and there are mangled bodies everywhere. She thinks that she sees an ordinary dress hanging on a peg, but realizes that it’s a body without a head or limbs. On the dress is pinned a black cat broach with Rhinestone eyes.
As they dig out the latest building and search for survivors, she finds what is left of one of the tenants from a previous timeline, the woman who always wore a black cat broach with a Rhinestone eye. She finds another woman who is gray with ash. Ursula can tell that she’s near death. The woman asks for her baby. The woman dies and Ursula frantically starts looking for the baby.
There is a gathering, a makeshift memorial at Fox Corner, and everyone is devastated. Ursula cries for days on end, inconsolable. Later, as a special request from Nancy, she and Izzie determine to find out once and for all if Teddy is dead. They go the air field and speak with the pilot who presumably saw the plane go down. He tells them that there is no way that Ted survived. He gives them the dog, Lucky, back. Apparently he hadn’t wanted to take it to Fox Corner and had kept it as a good luck mascot. However, now that Ted was gone, the men didn’t want it around reminding them of Teddy’s death.
Sylvie lies down on Teddy’s childhood bed, takes a whole bottle of sleeping pills and kills herself. They find out in the reading of the will that Hugh had left the house to Pamela. Maurice, as the oldest child, is upset beyond belief. Partly to rub it in his face, Pamela and her husband, decide to keep the house and continue living on there.
Maurice, honing in on the clause in the will that said that the contents of the house were to be divided among them, brings a van and starts looting the house. Ursula just wants the little carriage clock of Sylvie’s.
This is a reset from a former timeline. This time Ursula climbs into bed with the Whiskey, is so cold, thinks about the gas filling the room and killing her. Darkness begins to fall, only this time she wakes up. She had been ‘dreaming’ that she was trapped in a cellar.
This is a new timeline that is introduced. Thus far, none of the timelines have reached this far out into the future. The television states that the Jordanians opened fire on Tel Aviv. Ursula is worried about Ben Cole who is a member of the Israeli parliament. After WWII he’d helped to create the new sovereign country of Israel. She recalls that she’d met up with him a few years previously and he’d wanted to take her to bed. Having long since gotten over him, she turned him down. She’s just retired from her ministry job and has not married, nor has children.
Ursula shares that she’s been having sharp pains in her head, worse than headaches. The doctors don’t really know what it is. She has luncheon with Pamela’s oldest son, who is a history teacher. She muses that if Hitler hadn’t been allowed to implement the holocaust that perhaps the horrendous war wouldn’t have happened after all. They both muse how things might have turned out differently had Hitler never been allowed to come into power.
Ursula goes to sit on a bench in the park. The pain in her head starts in on her and she knows that she can’t make it back to her apartment. She shuts her eyes and hopes for it to pass. Slowly her mind begins to divest itself of every memory, of every sound that she hears in the park, as if she is a part of the larger world around her. She is once again an infant with the snow falling outside. She is cradled in loving arms and her father’s green eyes are smiling at her.
It is once again February 11, 1910 and the night of Ursula’s birth. What is different in this reset is that Hugh has made it through the snow to be there for the birth, and that the doctor has also made it in time to assist with the birth.
The scene skips forward to the beach. Ursula and Pamela are building a sandcastle near the water’s edge. Mr. Winton is painting a few yards down the beach. All of a sudden, Ursula has a terrible sense of foreboding. She feels as if something bad is about to happen. She leaves the castle and goes running to find her mother.
Afterwards, Ursula watches a thunderstorm roll in while standing by her bedroom window. She muses that the loud thunder sounds like war.
Sylvie takes Ursula to Dr. Kellet. To Sylvie’s shock, Ursula remembers Dr. Kellet, appropriately names his pipe, then draws the snake with its tail in its mouth…the same one he’d drawn for her many timelines before. He asks Sylvie if she knows what reincarnation is. Ursula says that she does. Dr. Kellet begins to ask her questions and she answers them without batting an eye.
Ursula goes to stay with Izzie for a few days in London. While in the a tea room Izzie leaves to powder her nose and Ursula is hit with a wave of horror and terror. She bolts from the restaurant and down roads that are not familiar to her in this timeline, but totally familiar to her from past timelines.
She wakes up in the hospital with Dr. Kellet standing near her. She tells him that time isn’t circular, but rather like a palimpsest. They have placed her in a sanatorium, and she learns that Dr. Kellet has long since retired. He continues to visit her. He cryptically asks her if she now has had enough.
It isn’t clear at first what he’s talking about until Ursula returns home to Fox Corners. She doesn’t tell anyone, but now she knows exactly the sequence of events that will take her into the inner circle of Hitler, so she can stop the unspeakable from happening. She needed one more lifetime, she thinks in answer to Dr. Kellet’s question. That night she throws herself off the rooftop.
In this timeline Ursula has inserted herself into the life of Eva Braun and has become her best friend. They go everywhere together and as such, when Eva begins seeing Hitler, Ursula is often with them. Because she is a woman, she is often overlooked.
She walks into the room, makes polite conversation, enjoys a pastry and a hot chocolate, then reaches into her purse for a handkerchief. The handkerchief is hiding her father’s old service revolver. Ursula pulls the trigger, but doesn’t know if she killed him or not. Darkness falls.
It is 1945 and Teddy and another man are drinking in a pub. He had been shot down, but he’d bailed out of the cockpit at the last minute, but ended up in a Stalag. Now, of course, they had been freed.
This time she gets closer to Hitler than in any previous timeline and pulls a gun on him. She is killed before she has the chance to kill Hitler. However, when she is reborn again, this time she determines to make better choices and most of the snags that have caused her issue throughout her lifetimes are straightened out. Her brother, Teddy, is still living, and has not died in his plane.
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