Movies Like About Time

Frequently asked about About Time

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• How does Tim discover he can time travel?▾

  On New Year's Day after Tim turns 21, his father takes him into a darkened room and tells him that all the men in their family have the ability to travel back in time within their own lives. To use it, Tim must find a dark enclosed space, clench his fists, and think hard about the moment he wants to return to. He immediately tests it by going back to a New Year's Eve party to kiss a girl he had missed his chance with.

• What is the rule about having children, and why does it matter?▾

  Tim's father warns him that once a child is born, he must not travel back to any point before that child's conception — doing so risks changing the circumstances of conception and resulting in a different child altogether. This rule becomes critical when Tim's sister Kit Kat has a car accident: Tim cannot go back far enough in the past to prevent it without risking un-creating his own children, forcing him to accept an imperfect outcome for her instead.

• Why does Tim stop time travelling by the end of the film?▾

  After his father dies, Tim discovers he can still visit him by travelling back to shared memories in the past. However, Tim gradually comes to realise that revisiting and optimising moments robs him of living spontaneously. His father's final lesson is to try living each ordinary day as if he had already gone back once and was now truly savouring it — and eventually Tim stops travelling altogether, choosing to experience life forwards without revision.

• What happens when Tim and his father take one last walk on the beach?▾

  Knowing his father is dying of cancer, Tim travels back in time to revisit a childhood memory of the two of them playing on the family's Cornish beach together. It is framed as a deliberate goodbye — both characters seem emotionally aware of its weight even though the scene is set in the past. Tim returns to the present afterwards and accepts that his father is gone, treating the visit as a final gift of time together rather than an attempt to cheat death.

• Why can't Tim prevent his friend Jay's play from being a disaster on opening night?▾

  Tim repeatedly travels back to try to fix the opening night of his flatmate Harry's play, but each attempt to solve one problem creates a new one — an actor forgets lines, the lighting fails, or another mishap occurs. The sequence illustrates an early lesson the film establishes: time travel can correct isolated moments but cannot guarantee a perfect outcome when multiple unpredictable variables are involved, foreshadowing the larger limits Tim faces later with Kit Kat.