'Time Helmet' Review: A Curious and Weirdly Charming Look into a Petty Future
- 18 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Romey Norton - March 16, 2026
Indie science fiction comedy lives or dies on the strength of its ideas. Budgets are small, spectacle is limited, and the rest must be carried by wit, imagination, and a willingness to lean into absurdity. Time Helmet, directed by Mike Jackson, understands this balance well enough to create something charmingly eccentric, even if it occasionally trips over the very paradoxes it plays with.
At the centre of the film is Donald Voltmann, whose finances are a mess, his relationship with his daughter is strained, and his divorce still hangs over him. He’s an inventor, and decides to create a device that looks suspiciously like a cross between a retro motorcycle helmet and something salvaged from a 1970s electronics lab. With this new creation, he promises the impossible: time travel. Donald’s motivation is less noble scientific curiosity and more the desperate hope of fixing his life. Naturally, the helmet works. Unfortunately, it works far too well. Now he must battle his future self and the Time Police to save his finances and his daughters love and respect.
What begins as a personal do-over quickly spirals into a bizarre legal and temporal battle when Donald discovers that his future self has been using time travel not for world-changing discoveries but for something far more mundane and petty: patent trolling his ex-wife. It’s a wonderfully odd premise, and the screenplay leans into the bureaucratic absurdity of time travel with surprising confidence. Instead of galactic stakes or catastrophic timelines, the threat here is financial ruin and family embarrassment.
The arrival of Officer Prudence Slaughter of the Time Police only escalates matters. Her presence introduces the film’s most overt satire: a universe where time travel exists but is regulated with the same weary procedural logic as parking enforcement. Slaughter’s deadpan authority provides a sharp counterbalance to Donald’s increasingly frantic attempts to untangle his own timeline. Oh, also, she's a child (played by Camryn Macdonald). This felt a little awkward at first, but the acting is so consistent you'll just run with it.
The acting is over-the-top without being ridiculous, and quirky without being unbelievable. The script’s humour is similarly offbeat. Much of the comedy emerges from the escalating absurdity of Donald arguing with different versions of himself while trying to avoid legal consequences that technically haven’t happened yet. I’m sure time-travel fans will scrutinise the script, but that is also part of the fun. Peter New as Donald has the engry and charisma of Jack Black and has great chemistry with Lou Ticzon, his calming influence sidekick. Supporting characters like Slaughters mother and the lawyer add more depth and humour to the film - the mother is especially humbling.
The visuals embrace their limitations rather than hide them; the helmet itself is delightfully homemade (like a rumba on literal fire), and the film’s time-travel effects have a scrappy, practical quality that feels closer to cult classics than to glossy studio fare.
Where the film struggles slightly is in its emotional throughline. Donald’s desire to reconnect with his daughter is meant to ground the story, but it feels overshadowed and underplayed. The audience understands the stakes intellectually, yet the film never quite slows down long enough for those emotional beats to land with full force. The runtime being nearly two hours feels nearly two hours, and it’s difficult to keep the audience constantly hooked and invested with a helmet and a prayer.
By the time Donald is forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that his worst enemy might literally be himself, the film has embraced its central idea with gleeful chaos. The climax, which pits Donald against his future counterpart while the Time Police close in, delivers exactly the kind of messy, paradox-filled confrontation the premise promises.
Time Helmet offers a playful indie comedy about regret, responsibility, and the dangers of giving a frustrated inventor access to the timeline. And in a genre often obsessed with saving the universe, there’s something refreshingly human about a time traveller whose biggest problem is a messy divorce and a really bad idea.
'Time Helmet' was selected to the 2025 GenCon Film Festival
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