‘In The Blink Of An Eye’ Review: Andrew Stanton’s Dull, Centuries-Spanning Epic Is Woolly And Sentimental – Sundance Film Festival

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• Related Stories Reviews Sundance Film Festival 2026: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews Festivals Sundance Film Festival Photos: ‘The Weight,’ ‘Run Amok’ & ‘Chasing Summer’ Premieres On Day 5 Like that weird, trippy interlude in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, In the Blink of an Eye begins with a brief history of time, accompanied by a pithy, literary line: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now.” Well, it’s certainly a cause for concern if you’re getting your inspirational slogans from Sylvia Plath, but the writer’s quote does explain the film’s ambitious structure, taking place in three very different timelines that, just as you might imagine, exist in the now and show many happy correlations with the present.
• Neanderthals and people in the future who live for hundreds of years — they’re just like us!
• Watch on Deadline Indeed, the first stop-off we make is in 45,000 BCE (Before Common Era, apparently), where a primitive man called Thorn is busy providing for his wife and child.
• This is by far the dullest section of a film that, even at the best of times, excels at being inoffensively unexciting, which means that just when we might be tiring of Thorn and his family, we are politely summoned to 2025.
• Here we meet Claire (Rashida Jones), an academic anthropologist who is forensically examining an ancient but well-preserved corpse that could — even though it mostly likely isn’t — be the famous Missing Link.