Has the combination of time-travel and romance ever made things easier? It doesn’t seem like that’ll be the case in Needle in a Timestack, writer-director John Ridley’s adaptation of Robert Silverberg’s 1983 short story. Cynthia Erivo and Leslie Odom Jr. star as Janine and Nick, a happy couple whose marriage is threatened by Orlando Bloom, who—well, it’s complicated.
Bloom’s character is Janine’s ex, and he’s warping time to try to break up her happy marriage. But the trailer focuses largely on Nick, who is also time-traveling, presumably to fix things? To recreate happy memories? And Nick’s ex is in here, too, in the form of Frieda Pinto. It’s all very emotionally fraught, but the snippets of dialogue used in the trailer aren’t doing a lot to put forth anything but a sort of mushy temporal fated-love vibe. Still, if anyone can sell this, it’s Erivo and Odom.
The rather melodramatic summary says:
If love is in the form of a circle, what lines would you cross to be with your soulmate? In this gripping, near-future love story directed by Oscar® winner John Ridley, Nick and Janine (Oscar® nominees Leslie Odom, Jr. and Cynthia Erivo) live in marital bliss, until Janine’s ex-husband (Orlando Bloom) warps time to try to tear them apart using Nick’s college girlfriend (Frieda Pinto). As Nick’s memories and reality disappear, he must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in order to hold onto — or let go of — everything he loves. Can love endure in a future where time is fluid, and all of life may be just an illusion?
The release plan for this film is a bit of a curiosity: it’s opening in select theaters and available on demand on October 15th, with a DVD/Blu-Ray release four days later, on the 19th. So not quite straight to video, but… close.
