In this film, a boy named Evan grows up while experiencing blackouts throughout his childhood where he comes back to reality without remembering a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-ZLGaU4oI His mom worries for him and takes him to multiple doctors to try and find an answer but is unable to find one. The only thing they recommend is to keep a journal in hopes that this can provide answers. His father is in a mental facility, and until now, Evan had no knowledge of him. However, his mother allows him to visit him. This interaction that was supposed to be peaceful, ends in his father trying to kill him and in turn getting killed himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEiWclVKg1s While Evan grows up, he hangs out with his three friends: Kayleigh, Lenny, and Tommy. However, they get into too much trouble which leaves Evan’s mother no choice but to move to another town. His childhood ends there, and it resumes with him in college. One day, he stumbles across his old journals. While reading a passage, he gets transported back to a childhood memory involving Kayleigh, Tommy, and their father. In this memory, the father forced the children to undress and perform sexual acts while filming them. He comes back into his current state, unsure of what just happened, his roommate claiming that he blacked out. He decides to go visit Kayleigh back in his hometown and has an intense conversation with her about their past and her father, which leaves her to storm off. Back at college the next day, he gets a phone call from her brother Tommy saying that she killed herself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QeAIpmiIyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRgrIceITLo Evan rushes to his journals to try and go back in time again hoping he can change something in the past, that won’t end in Kayleigh killing herself. He somehow succeeds, but when he comes back to reality, his life is completely different, an alternate reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L2dyDpd7LA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LimvO4zrETM&t=100s However, there are problems with this reality too, leaving Evan to once again travel back into the past to change an event that will change the future. An interesting aspect to note is that when he time travels to the past, it is not in his current college body, but instead he goes inside of his child self. This explains his blackouts as a child where his original self didn’t have control of his body as his future body was inhabiting it in that moment in time. This cycle continues throughout the movie where he travels back in time, returns to reality, doesn’t like it, and does it all over again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TqRcAl_928 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcGug2d-Sls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zWf02vGl3M However, this constant back and forth takes a toll on his brain, and when coming back to the present once again, he is in a psychiatric ward. His doctor, when asked about the journals by Evan, explains that there are no journals. To the doctor, Evan is using the idea of the journals and traveling to the past as an effort to deal with the fact that he killed Kayleigh, which happened when he time traveled the previous time. As a result, he has delusions that he lives in parallel worlds, but Evan won’t believe him. He still thinks he can time travel and needs to go back one last time to save Kayleigh. Although the journals do not exist, there was a photo album that the doctor had mentioned. He had figured out a while ago that his father had had the same condition as him that allowed him to travel back through photos instead of journals. This leads Evan to conclude that its not necessarily the journals that help him travel, he just needs something to link him to his past memories. His only option left are home movies that his mom brings to him upon his request. He accomplishes his task and travels back a final time, but this time to his mother’s womb. In this moment, he strangles his fetus self, thus preventing himself from ever being born and ruining the lives around him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixYWkDAPPzA This brings in the idea of the Grandfather Paradox, in which he has killed himself and therefore undone his existence. This is the same as killing your own grandfather, creating a loop. This goes against the longstanding Paradox that you cannot change the past. This is one of the major discrepancies in the film in where it doesn’t stay true to the physics of time travel. Another question that arises from his numerous time travel attempts, is where are the rest of the Evan’s that have been displaced by his time travel? The two explanations are that these versions are destroyed by Evan himself when he displaces them, or there are multiple timelines where Evan creates a new universe every time he changes something in the past. However, this would change this movie more into a parallel universe film rather than a time travel film, similar to Looper. Although this was an interesting film, it is an impossible film. There are many cracks that are inconsistent with “time” and some of the actions he partakes in are not feasible.