Ticking Clock 2011

Keech, Cuba Gooding Jr., murders a woman and cuts her open, then calmly hushes the crying baby in her arms, setting a chilling tone for the unraveling mystery.

Louis, an investigative reporter, finds his life tangled: a rocky marriage to Gina Hicks, Danielle Nicolet, a girlfriend named Felecia, Veronica Berry, and a career slipping away. When District Attorney Felicia tells him she’s ending the relationship, the move pushes him deeper into a dangerous chain of events. That same day, Keech kills Felicia in her own home, a brutal act that launches Louis into a frantic, confusing scramble. A struggle ends with Keech dropping a book and escaping; the volume is Keech’s journal, a key clue that promises the next murders and the motive behind them.

Louis attempts to alert the police, but his story only hardens the suspicion against him. He follows a lead to a scheduled murder involving a schoolteacher named Vicki, asking her out in the meantime, though she drinks at a bar instead. Keech stalks Vicki there as well, revealing a troubling, abusive past she once reported, and when she leaves for the restroom, he follows and murders her. Louis arrives too late to save her, finding Vicki already dead and his theory about Keech growing more difficult to prove.

With scant proof—only a torn fragment of Keech’s coat and a bloody fingerprint on a newspaper clipping—Louis sends the evidence to a crime lab for analysis. The lab worker confirms the blood belongs to an 11-year-old orphan living in a boys’ home, and she notes an unusual heat-reactive fabric in Keech’s coat. The boy’s home is run by Polly, the director, who introduces Louis to James, a troubled child who dreams of traveling back in time to fix his life. James shows Louis a box filled with small dead animals, a stark symbol of the cycle Keech is trying to break. Keep reading, and you’ll see how James’s unsettled world unsettles Louis even more, as betrayal and fear ripple between them.

Tracing the newly revealed threads, Louis deduces that Polly is the next target on Keech’s list. Keech’s true aim seems to be escaping a painful past by manipulating events: he believes that by killing Polly, framing Lewis for the crime, and orchestrating James’s dramatic intervention to make Louis look like a hero, he can finally alter his own fate. Yet Keech’s plan shows cracks as James secretly follows Louis and confronts Keech, asking if Keech is his father. Keech claims to be James’s future self, a revelation that unsettles both men.

As the drama escalates, James opposes Keech’s intentions toward Polly, reminding Keech that Polly has shown kindness to him. The confrontation ends with Keech dropping a futuristic knife and James grabbing it, slashing Keech’s leg, and Keech accidentally pushing James off the roof and shooting Louis in the chest. Keech vanishes as James dies from the fall, leaving Louis to drive home with a heavy, haunting truth.

In the end, because James dies young, he never becomes Keech—the serial killer. The threat seems quelled, but the film closes by showing that each victim remains alive in an alternate loop, including James, who is finally seen back with his mother, hinting that the past’s wounds may never be completely erased.