You watch a single ember die and suddenly time feels negotiable. I had that jolt the first time the past and a future ship folded into the same breath. You will find the film asking for small faith in big connections.
I want to be blunt: In the Blink of an Eye is Andrew Stanton stretching his instincts from animation into live action, and the result is intimate, strange, and often surprisingly tender. You’ll see three eras — 45,000 years ago, now, and 400 years ahead — fold into a single question about how lives leave traces.
A chipped bone in a museum drawer.
Rashida Jones plays the scientist who studies those traces. On screen she treats an ancient Neanderthal fragment the way a detective treats a cold file: a map to stories that refuse to stay dead. The film gives us a prehistoric life rendered with care, a modern archive that smells of coffee and catalog numbers, and a far-future voyage that keeps you counting hours until something changes.
The narrative links — the moments where you think you know a causal line — flip you. Stanton threads those flips into an emotional logic that lands more often than it misses, and when it lands the feeling is precise: memory as inheritance, grief as instruction. The Neanderthal scenes feel tactile, like a fossil pressed into a page, and they give gravity to choices made centuries later.
A cramped editing bay with monitors and coffee cups.
You can see the fingerprints of Stanton’s Pixar past in the film’s economy of gesture and silence. He’s the Oscar-winning director behind Wall-E and Finding Nemo, and his move back to live action after 2012’s John Carter carries the same appetite for scale and emotion.
io9 has the exclusive featurette that teases those ambitions: actors Rashida Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Daveed Diggs describe how the material stretched them, and Stanton talks craft — shot choices, tone, and why the film’s three threads needed to feel inevitable yet surprising. If you follow industry reporting on platforms like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb you’ll see early reactions cluster around the film’s scope and the strength of those performances.
When does In the Blink of an Eye release on Hulu?
The film debuts on Hulu on February 27, 2026. If you keep a watchlist on Hulu or use the service’s “My Stuff” queue, add it now so you don’t lose the momentum of curiosity.
A screening room where a single line of dialogue makes everyone look up.
Kate McKinnon’s future character carries the film’s speculative pulse; Daveed Diggs supplies a quicksilver moral center. You’ll notice moments that reframe earlier scenes — Stanton arranges revelations so they grow in emotional weight rather than spectacle.
The film is more focused than John Carter — tighter in its emotional aim — though it sometimes resists tidy catharsis. But that resistance is part of its charm: instead of spoon-feeding a payoff, Stanton trusts actors and sound design to carry implication. The result often feels precarious and beautiful, like a fragile bridge of glass over an ocean of time.
What is In the Blink of an Eye about?
At simplest: three stories about connection. A Neanderthal family, a present-day anthropologist, and a woman on a colony mission. Themes ripple — parenthood, legacy, the small choices that echo — until an unexpected structural fold makes those ripples read as a single wave.
A Hulu queue where you decide what to watch tonight.
Is this a one-night streaming thrill or something that will sit in your head? My read: it’s a rare, original film that rewards viewers who like emotional risk in their science fiction. If you follow film coverage on Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and io9, you’ll see it framed as a return-to-form experiment for a director best known for animation.
Is In the Blink of an Eye worth watching?
If you care about performances, ambitious storytelling, and films that try to feel generational rather than merely cinematic, yes — it’s worth a night in front of your TV. If you prefer linear, buttoned-up plotting, prepare for a few moments of ambiguity that won’t resolve into neat closure.
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The exclusive featurette is a good clue, the performances are a reason to stay, and Stanton’s ambition is the question that keeps you scrolling — after spending time in these stitched worlds, where do you stand: moved into hope or persuaded by skepticism?