Needle in a Timestack is a 2021 American science-fiction romance from writer-director John Ridley, built around a marriage under threat from a rival who can travel through time.
What is Needle in a Timestack about?
Nick and Janine share a settled, affectionate marriage, but Janine's former husband holds a rare ability to alter the past, and he uses it to reroute the timeline itself in an attempt to win her back. As his intervention erodes the history the couple built together, Nick starts losing pieces of his own memory, and the film follows his scramble to hold on to a life that keeps unravelling around him. The story turns his crisis into a slow-burning question about identity: how much of a shared history can vanish before the people inside it stop recognizing what they had, and what Nick is willing to give up to keep the parts of it he can still reach.
About the cast
The film's ensemble is led by Leslie Odom Jr. and Freida Pinto, joined by Cynthia Erivo and Orlando Bloom, with further roles filled by Jadyn Wong, Ulka Simone Mohanty, Elizabeth Weinstein and Gourav Shah.
Context & significance
Ridley works at the intersection of speculative science fiction and intimate relationship drama, using a time-travel premise as the mechanism for a story about memory, loss and the choices that hold a marriage together. The film sits at the crossover point of genres many streaming catalogues keep separate, pairing a genre concept with a slower, more character-driven pace than a typical time-travel thriller, closer in spirit to a chamber drama than an effects-driven spectacle.
Watching Needle in a Timestack on Ktime
Needle in a Timestack streams on K-Time with a free account login, and it is available with a Persian-dubbed audio track for viewers who prefer to watch in Farsi. The platform's Farsi-first interface makes it simple for the Iranian diaspora audience to browse the catalogue and settle into a full-length feature like this one without friction.