‘In the Blink of an Eye’ Review: Andrew Stanton’s Feature Film Return is an Epic, Triptych Timeline Stunner [A] | Sundance

Andrew Stanton’s career at Pixar once unfolded with the clean inevitability of a well-told parable. He directed A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, and WALL•E—films that married technological bravura to an almost old-fashioned humanism—and then, curiously, retreated to the small screen, where he has spent the past decade. His most recent feature, 2016’s Finding Dory, arrived in theaters around the same moment that Colby Day’s script for In the Blink of an Eye landed on the Black List and quickly distinguished itself as an unusually earnest piece of science fiction. Stanton fell in love with the script, and the pairing makes a certain intuitive sense: few contemporary directors are as fluent in the language of wonder, or as attentive to the emotional aftershocks that linger once the spectacle has faded.

The easiest shorthand for In the Blink of an Eye is to call it this generation’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—or, more precisely, its philosophical inverse. Like Stanley Kubrick’s film, it spans millennia and contemplates humanity’s relationship to its tools, its technologies, and its own extinction. Where 2001 gazes at mankind with chilly ambivalence, Stanton’s film is animated by a stubborn, almost radical optimism. Artificial intelligence here is not a harbinger of annihilation but a companion species, and progress, though halting and cruelly expensive, is framed as an extension of our oldest instinct: the desire not to be alone.

The story unfurls across three timelines. In 45,000 B.C.E., a Neanderthal family—played with grave simplicity by Jorge Vargas, Tanaya Beatty, and Skywalker Hughes—navigates the daily extremities of survival. They possess language, fire, rudimentary medicine, and tools, but each innovation arrives only partially formed, never quite enough to stave off the arbitrary violence of the natural world. These sequences are spare and tactile, attentive to breath, gesture, and our most primitive predispositions.

The present-day strand follows Claire (Rashida Jones), an archaeology student who seems more comfortable communing with the skeleton she’s excavating than with her prospective boyfriend, Greg (Daveed Diggs), whose presence suggests a future she can’t quite picture herself inhabiting. When Claire’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, the plan for her carefully deferred life falls apart. She abandons her fellowship and returns home to Vancouver, Canada, where time suddenly becomes brutally finite.

The film’s third timeline leaps forward to the year 2417. Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is en route to a human settlement on Kepler-16B, a journey that will take 126 years. Her sole companion is Rosco (voiced by Rhona Rees), a future iteration of the digital assistant—thankfully nothing like HAL 9000—whose calm pragmatism is tinged with genuine concern. When the plants responsible for producing oxygen begin to fail, Coakley and Rosco are confronted with a stark dilemma: only one of them may be able to complete the mission.

On paper, In the Blink of an Eye reads as forbiddingly ambitious, a piece of high-concept science fiction that risks crumbling under the weight of its own ideas. Stanton, however, has a long history of coaxing intimacy out of enormity. He once turned a near-silent love story between trash compactors into a global blockbuster, and here he applies the same faith in visual storytelling and emotional clarity. The film moves fluidly between epochs, never lingering long enough for the mechanics to feel labored.

Much of that momentum is owed to the sound editor Ryan Joe Allam, whose deft use of J-cuts allows dialogue and ambient noise from one era to bleed into another. These transitions function less as narrative bridges than as philosophical rhymes. The precise connections among the three timelines are withheld until the final movement, but a shared longing—for continuity, for understanding, for connection—asserts itself almost immediately in each.

That In the Blink of an Eye arrives with this level of polish only to be shunted quickly to Hulu and Disney+ feels faintly surreal. With Ola Maslik’s expansive production design, Ole Bratt Birkeland’s luminous cinematography, and Thomas Newman’s searching, elegiac score, the film seems engineered for the immersive hush of a theatrical space. It deserves, at the very least, a week on IMAX screens, where its sense of scale could register not merely as spectacle but as awe-inspiring. In a culture increasingly accustomed to shrinking its grandest visions to the size of a living-room screen, Stanton’s film insists—quietly, persistently—that some ideas are still big enough to warrant looking up.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where In the Blink of an Eye had its world premiere. Searchlight Pictures will release the film on February 26.