A Quantum Leap into Nihilism.

Some time-travel films bend causality to explore fate, some tie themselves in knots trying to be cleverer than the audience, and a few opt for the sentimental cheat of resetting tragedy just to earn a second swing at the tear ducts. The First Time I Never Met You is smarter, smaller, and more sincere than that. It doesn’t smirk at its own cleverness. It doesn’t flinch from consequence. And crucially, it doesn’t let genre tropes crowd out the quiet human ache at its centre.

Eric Kole writes, directs, and stars as John, a grief-stricken physicist whose experimental tech inadvertently yanks him back to the past—not to fix it, not to rewrite history, but to relive one of the happiest moments of his life: the first date with his late wife, Esmé (Renee Bailey). Only of course, she doesn’t know him yet. And he knows too much.

You can spot particles of About Time, where time travel is a metaphor for emotional maturity, in its continuum or flashes of 50 First Dates, which wields re-attempting romantic encounters for comedic effect. But while those films build arcs of renewal, The First Time I Never Met You dares to contemplate the melancholy of blowing that second chance. This John isn’t simply stepping into old shoes – he’s forearmed with knowledge and haunted by the love and loss he’s experienced, coming on too strong and too familiar, unmooring him from the man Esmé would – and should – fall in love with.

At just under 15 minutes, the short knows better than to overindulge. It sketches its sci-fi scaffolding with swift elegance, using colour design as a temporal compass – cool blues for the present, warm ambers for the past, uncanny purples when time distorts. It’s a smart visual shorthand, unobtrusive but effective.

Kole is quietly compelling in his restraint, anchoring John with just enough weariness and wonder to sell the science without breaking the soul. Bailey’s Esmé is warm and open, but we only ever see her through the gauze of John’s memory and longing while Osy Ikhile provides sparing, sharp support as a confidant caught between pragmatism and empathy. The trio form a subtle web of relational dynamics, never overstated, always earned.

There’s something quietly subversive in the way the film refuses catharsis. It toys with the fantasy of second chances but offers no easy redemptions. Instead, it becomes a story about the bleak pragmatism of time travel, that foreknowledge is a burden and that the lens of grief can magnify and distort the stakes until bargaining short-circuits to acceptance of an irrevocably altered reality.

For all its genre DNA, The First Time I Never Met You resists the pull of high-concept exposition. It doesn’t spell out its paradoxes or timelines, its strength lying in what it chooses not to explain and trusting the audience to understand that loss warps reality more powerfully than any machine. There are many shorts which have gone on to be reimagined and expanded as feature-length projects and this is certainly one that deserves the chance to tell its story on a much bigger canvas. 

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You can watch The First Time I Never Met You on YouTube: