Space/Time (2025) Parents Guide

The Australian drama “Space/Time” follows a group of scientists racing to solve interstellar travel so humanity can abandon the Earth it has already trashed and begin again somewhere distant and untouched. Their first attempt ends in catastrophe and the collapse of their funding. Three years later, they regroup in secrecy, working off the grid, outside the law.

That’s the premise, anyway. Yet what the film seems most deeply invested in is not the future of humanity, but the sheer audacity of its own craft a quality so pronounced it becomes impossible to ignore, sometimes impressive, sometimes a little self-conscious, often both.

Shot back in 2016 by director Michael O’Halloran alongside his co-writer Adam Harmer, but only now receiving a proper commercial release, “Space/Time” is very much a product of scrappy persistence. The production was stitched together from the filmmakers’ own savings, a bank loan, scattered investors, and some assistance from the Australian government. Much of the film was shot inside a warehouse that doubles as the research facility and, by necessity, seems to moonlight as several other environments too.

The result feels like a film that has learned to disguise its limitations with confidence like one of those small animals that inflates itself to appear larger, more dangerous, more mythic than it really is. You can admire the instinct even when you see the seams.

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The story opens on a fractured glimpse of the team’s disastrous first attempt to create a wormhole, staged in a lab on the remote Rice Island. Then the film leaps forward three years, landing on the closing moments of the official investigation into that failure. From there, we follow Liv (Ashlee Lollback), who is quietly drawn into an underground second attempt unauthorized, secretive, and financed by a mysterious French tech billionaire named Renault (Haroon Jafarey-Hall). That opening sequence also introduces the two men who will come to define Liv’s emotional and moral orbit: Harris (Pacharo Mzembe), a government agent she eventually marries, and Holt (Hugh Parker), the brilliant, obsessive architect of the original mission, now missing and presumed dead after the explosion his own zeal helped trigger.

When the timeline catches up, Harris has been relegated to the margins of the story, recast into a role we usually see assigned to women: the anxious, sidelined spouse of the driven hero. Holt, meanwhile, reemerges to recruit Liv into his new covert project, slowly pressing her toward decisions that scrape painfully against her ethical core.

If “Space/Time” sparks arguments after the credits roll, they likely won’t be about the plot mechanics or the film’s grand themes. The more pressing question is whether this fiercely ambitious, fiercely self-conscious little movie amounts to more than a polished showcase reel for its cast and crew. Everyone involved behaves as if they’re making a sprawling, mainstream sci-fi epic in the lineage of late-20th-century blockbusters “Stargate” and “Contact” loom especially large even though the resources on screen plainly don’t match the scale of those inspirations. There’s something touching about that ambition, and something slightly strained about it too.

The film gestures toward the territory of more cerebral, philosophically dense science fiction. Both the script and the visuals flirt with big ideas: metaphysics, morality, spirituality, the long-term fate of the species. But these ideas often remain gestures rather than fully formed explorations. Still, there are moments near the climax that briefly suggest a richer film lurking beneath the surface. Holt, in particular, delivers a strikingly persuasive argument for abandoning Earth altogether not out of conquest, but out of recognition that humanity has already hollowed the planet out, treating it like a dumping ground for millennia. His vision of erasing the past and starting clean carries an unsettling clarity. He almost sounds like Don Draper in “Mad Men,” offering that chilling reassurance after a moral collapse: This never happened. You’ll be amazed how much this never happened.

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It’s a dangerous move, dramatically speaking, to give the most coherent arguments to a character framed as the antagonist. It risks revealing a kind of split conscience in the film itself as though the filmmakers intellectually understand Holt’s position but emotionally prefer the safer, more conventionally heroic alternative. “Space/Time” avoids collapsing under that contradiction largely because of Ashlee Lollback’s performance. She is photographed with near-mythic reverence athletic, classically beautiful, lit and framed like a marble statue yet the script offers her little in the way of textured characterization beyond “she is smart, she is good, she is our hero.” That’s thin ice for any actor.

And yet Lollback holds. She has a steadiness, a kind of moral gravity, that keeps Liv grounded even when the writing doesn’t. This is crucial because Hugh Parker, as Holt, has the more flamboyant, psychologically rich role. He plays Holt as a man whose serene, almost messianic intensity may be less about salvation and more about an unexamined longing for self-destruction. You can feel the danger in him. It would be easy for a performance like that to swallow the film whole. Lollback’s restraint becomes the anchor, ensuring we stay emotionally aligned with Liv, sharing her confusion, her revulsion, her reluctant empathy.

Still, the film’s overall temperament leans heavily toward the mainstream Hollywood tradition of idea-driven sci-fi that’s really just an action movie in disguise sleek sets, techno-babble, and concepts that must be explained at exhausting length. The screenplay by O’Halloran and Harmer is, unfortunately, the weakest element here. It delivers information like an instruction manual, leaning hard on stiff exposition and dialogue that occasionally induces a wince. There’s a moment when Harris calls Renault “odd,” and Liv replies with forced perkiness, “Well, do you know any reclusive billionaire industrialists who aren’t?” You can practically hear the screenwriting software congratulating itself.

Visually and structurally, “Space/Time” makes a clear choice not to drift too far into art-house abstraction. It keeps returning to the interpersonal conflict between Liv and Holt, and to the logistical buildup toward the extended, brutal confrontation that dominates the finale. That climax is staged amid relics of the team’s previous failed experiments, with fragments of abandoned attempts arranged around the characters like exhibits in a museum devoted to human hubris. It’s a potent visual idea you can feel the weight of accumulated failure pressing in on them.

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By the time the film ends, it’s clear that “Space/Time” wants to be about something larger: ethics, survival, responsibility, maybe even redemption. But you might still struggle to articulate exactly what that something is. And yet, paradoxically, the film leaves an impression anyway. The restless camera, the jagged editing, the raw physicality of the confrontations, the punishing sound design all of it hits with enough force that you walk out feeling shaken, stimulated, oddly grateful for the experience, even if the meaning remains just out of reach.

Space/Time Parents Guide

MPA Rating: Not Rated

Violence & Intensity: There are brutal physical confrontations in the film’s final stretch, including an extended fight that is emotionally and physically punishing rather than stylized. The camera work during these sequences is restless and immersive, which heightens the sense of distress rather than softening it. The sound design is described as “bone-rattling,” and the editing is jagged and aggressive, creating a sustained feeling of anxiety.

The film opens with the aftermath of a catastrophic scientific experiment, and the emotional fallout of that disaster hangs over everything that follows. Characters wrestle with guilt, obsession, and moral compromise. The intensity is psychological as much as physical you can feel the pressure building scene by scene.

Language: The review does not indicate heavy profanity or slur usage, and there is no suggestion of hate speech.

However, the tone of the dialogue is often serious, confrontational, and emotionally heavy. Characters argue, manipulate, and challenge one another’s ethics. While there is a bit of awkward, occasionally clunky exposition (including one eye-rolling joke about billionaires), the emotional atmosphere remains tense.

Sexual Content / Nudity: There is no indication of sexual content or nudity in the material described.Relationships exist including a marriage but they are treated emotionally and thematically rather than physically. The film’s focus is on obsession, ethics, and ambition, not romance or sexuality.

Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: The MOVIE does not contain any drug use, alcohol abuse, or smoking as thematic or visual elements. If present at all, these elements are not emphasized or central to the film’s impact.

Age Recommendations

• Recommended: Ages 15+ (mature teens and adults)
• Caution: Under 14 likely too intense, emotionally complex, and tonally heavy
• Not ideal for: Younger children, who may find it confusing, distressing, or simply exhausting.