SUNDANCE: ‘In The Blink of an Eye’ Is Engaging But Slight

It’s been ten years since Andrew Stanton directed a film—Pixar’s Finding Dory—and 14 years since he made his live-action filmmaking debut with Disney’s underrated John Carter. As Stanton is making his return to animation later in 2026 with Toy Story 5, it only feels appropriate then that his live-action homecoming, In the Blink of an Eye, releases in the same year.

Following in the footsteps of The Fountain and Cloud Atlas, In the Blink of an Eye is a millennia-spanning would-be epic that stresses the importance of loving one another. Although this is a beautiful sentiment, Stanton’s execution sometimes feels too slight for the material.

In the Blink of an Eye is broken up into three distinct timelines. The initial timeline the audience is thrown into is that of a Neanderthal family trying to survive. Easily, this is the most well-realized out of the three. Cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland could have crafted more ambitious visuals to accompany the era.

In the Blink of an Eye’s first story is its best.

However, the pain the family endures, communicated mostly in grunts, really captures their soaring rapture. The other segments needed the depth of their perseverance to sing through the material. This segment truly feels like the only segment of In the Blink of an Eye that works as a standalone. 

That’s not to say the second segment of In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t have its value. Set in the modern day, this storyline follows two graduate students, Claire (Rashida Jones) and Greg (Daveed Diggs), falling in love amidst a family tragedy in Claire’s life.

Jones and Diggs’ chemistry is genuinely lovely, and screenwriter Colby Day is invested in exploring the healing power of having a significant other there to help through life’s darkest moments. Unfortunately, this segment is somewhat kneecapped by not exploring the pain in Claire’s life: her mother’s illness. When the main struggle in a character’s life is mostly undefined, it’s hard to truly buy into their struggle.

Kate McKinnon’s story feels like it would have served better as its own full movie.

The last storyline In the Blink of an Eye is easily the most disjointed. All the pieces are here in theory. The storyline is quite good on paper, involving an astronaut, Coakley (Kate McKinnon), with a prolonged lifespan on a colonization mission to restart life away from the dying Earth.

Despite McKinnon’s best efforts, this story wants to cover too much ground. Coakley’s friendship with an onboard AI, the struggles to maintain the ship, and Coakley raising the next generation of humanity all fight for screen time. Altogether, it feels like a story that desperately needed its own 94-minute movie rather than being a piece of one.

With one great story, one mostly good one, and one confused one, Stanton and editor Mollie Goldstein take a poetic approach to cutting together In the Blink of an Eye’s storylines. The film is aided by a score by Thomas Newman that lets it glide from story to story without jarring the audience too badly.

The romance is too fragmented and the quality too cheap.

Getting one little piece of a story at a time does lead to In the Blink of an Eye’s short runtime feeling like a bit of a slow crawl, yet the effect of multiple timelines compounding on top of one another is surprisingly quite successful. 

A big elephant in the room with In the Blink of an Eye is that it feels cheap. Here’s a streaming film that, in all senses of the word, feels like the cheap product visually that most streaming films, perhaps unfairly, get accused of looking like. Moreover, outside of the Neanderthal storyline and much of the Rashida Jones/Daveed Diggs romance, the actual narrative of In the Blink of an Eye is incredibly fragmented, to the point where it feels like a long montage rather than a feature film.

The saving grace of In the Blink of an Eye is that it has a heart as big as the timeframe it spans. Andrew Stanton and Colby Day have a thesis: although our physical bodies may not last forever, our love for each other will echo throughout time.

In the Blink of an Eye leads with a pure heart.

The film goes out of its way to demonstrate what true love for one another looks like, from the dawn of time to its new beginning. Many films have made the statement before that what matters is the love we leave behind; few are as sincere as In the Blink of an Eye is.

In the Blink of an Eye is unlikely to be the major comeback fans were expecting of Andrew Stanton. It’s a bit of a shaggy, slight movie that can’t quite stick the landing on its multi-generational storytelling. Nevertheless, In the Blink of an Eye leads with such a pure heart that, at the very least, it makes for an engaging, earnest watch.

In the Blink of an Eye premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The film streams on Hulu on February 27.