Predestination is like an empty respite of self-awareness knowing its episodes, a bleak and tumultuous silence. It is full of poignant but mawkish contextualization, which is persuasive but lacking remark to temporal chasm—to alienated Notion without Bildung—in its vacuous dip, dropping out and omitting incompetently as much as it censors. It drives impulsive expostulation with good intention, namely to provide appropriate, albeit specious template identification, yet which is like saying time can be defied just to mend interpersonal ties when neither, in fact, is intelligible mutually. It seems to mark out an ambitious ambiance for, to cherish, the flat disturbance and erroneousness of spies, being steeply attracted to nuisance behaviours like barkeeping, self-indulgence, and scholasticism habituated (with, sadly, utmost seriousness) in the film, like its heightened sounds and exogenous things to shrug off.
Predestination deliberately carves a niche for insincere acceptance of hysteria, only to repress its possibility in every way. It draws purely on the power of personalization, which is then and later subjugated in function of sadistic regulatory deliverance (to float institutional embodiment), in order to validate an apparently futile series of disclosures, and yet its depiction is anachronistic, a selfsame admission. What might be an homage to mental illness is concealed with force—much like involvement with variegated plethoras of treatment service in real life often exists—albeit, not intentionally—in this same way, leaving only a tenuous stranded certainty that, if there was really a rational champion to the pockmarked narrative, as it were, it were not people with vested interest, but oneself. At one point, Hawke’s mercenarial offer to his co-actor, who is clearly the suffering party, constitutes an outright elision of reality, quite beside the all-consuming point of time travel, and his doggedness as an actor is engulfed by his related steps to self-stimulation.
