Police inspector Lenders' wife is being shot during a bank robbery. When Lenders resumes service after many months, he investigates in a mysterious murder case which seems to be connected to the bank robbery, bringing up a computer hard drive with a message from the future. Lenders contacts a group of physicists at the local university to learn about the possibilities of time travel. They realize that the message from the future is possibly a blueprint for a time machine. Lenders attempts to make the homicides connected with the case and the bank robbery undone by time travel. About the first half of the movie is quite ok, and in the beginning the plot unfolds like a usual crime story, with some hints at time loops and things to come sprinkled in, and the acting and cinematography are solid. But further into the movie, the story quickly deteriorates and gets more and more muddled up. The choice to give pseudo-explanations for the possibility of time travel is, on one hand, interesting and gathers some of the notorious popular science jargon related to time travel, like the "butterfly effect", "quantum mechanical uncertainties", the "grandfather paradox" and the "unwritten book paradox" etc. However, it is set in scene such that it fails to work for the movie. It is all too obvious that it is all senseless mumbo-jumbo, and the scientists are portrayed in a way that borders on the ludicrous. In the end, the movies' main themes are brought to a destructive interference, resulting in neither a good thriller or crime story, nor in a good time travel narrative. That is actually a pity. Genre movies find it difficult to stand their ground with the German audience in general, but from its scope, the movie might well have been more successful with a better script and directing, and more financial backing. It is strange that two actresses appearing in the movie, who are actually far better known than the rest of the cast, Sylvia Hoeks (in the female lead role) and Antje Traue (in a supporting role) do not appear in the IMDb cast list. Sylvia Hoeks is actually a miscast as a scientist, she doesn't fit for the role and says her lines containing scientific terms like a robot, making it entirely obvious that all of that doesn't mean anything to her. One may speculate why apparently the agencies of the two actresses wanted to avoid them to be associated to the movie.
Review by LentilSoup from the Internet Movie Database.
Ex-Police Commissioner Lenders makes a staggering discovery while investigating a murder: one of the victims comes from another time period.
