In the Shadow of the Moon is a time-travelling, sci-fi thriller starring Boyd Holbrook and, well, basically just Boyd Holbrook as Thomas Lockhart. He is joined by Cleopatra Coleman as Rya – a mysterious serial killer – and Bokeem Woodbine as Maddox, his partner.
If you still plan on watching the movie, steer clear as this article will, as the headline says, explain the plot and, you know, spoil it. But if you saw it and were confused, strap in and scroll down. You're in good company – time travel is confusing.
We pick up in 1988, following three disparate people: a concert pianist, a bus driver and a fry-cook in a diner. All of them begin exhibiting odd symptoms of bleeding before losing consciousness.
Meanwhile, Thomas Lockhart is a uniformed police officer, living with his very pregnant wife in Philadelphia. Lockhart is working gruelling night shifts when he gets a call about a bus crash and a suspicious death.
He arrives on the scene with his partner Maddox but detective Holt – Lockhart's brother-in-law – is already there. The bus driver has bled out from the ears, eyes and nose, and her skull is wholly devoid of brain. Yep, it's disintegrated and flooded out of her head. Gross.
Lockhart spots a strange puncture in the back of her neck: three holes in a triangle shape.
A call comes in about a similar death and Lockhart and Maddox head to the concert hall to find the pianist with the same injuries, including the holes. Then, you guessed it, they find the fry-cook with the same injuries.
Another call comes in: a young woman in a nightclub was attacked by a young, black woman in a blue hoodie with an injured hand, who jabbed her with something in the back of the neck. They rush to the scene where they get a description before the girl begins bleeding from the face and dies.
The hunt begins for the suspected killer. They chase her into the subway. Lockhart corners her. She pulls down her hood and addresses him by his first name. She says congratulations and sorry about your partner.
They fight and she falls into the tracks just as a train comes zooming through the station. Problem solved. Meanwhile, it turns out Lockhart's wife has been rushed to the hospital. She gives birth to their daughter but dies in labour.
Fast forward nine years to 1997. Protestors flood the streets demanding justice for the unidentified black girl killed back in 1988 for murders they never proved she committed.
Lockhart, meanwhile, is now a detective with a 9-year-old daughter, Amy. He's supposed to take her to the zoo, but then a copycat killer begins stalking victims resulting in deaths eerily similar to those in 1997.
Holt, now a Lieutenant, publicises surveillance footage of the copycat. Back at the office, Lockhart traces the keys found in the mystery girl's possession from 1988 to an aircraft manufactured in 1996. Spooky.
A physicist named Naveen Rao (Rudi Dharmalingam) tells Maddox and Lockhart that the person they're pursuing now, in 1997, is the same girl and she can travel through time due to the specific positioning of the moon.
They dismiss him, however (imagine!) and head to the airfield. There, Lockhart finds the same suspect from 1988 who supposedly died. Not only is she alive but she also hasn't aged.
They are surprised by Maddox and she unintentionally kills him, takes Lockhart hostage and reveals more about him than she should be able to know. She warns him to stop chasing her and then pushes him out of the aeroplane.
Zoom, we're now in 2006.
Lockhart has become obsessed with the time-travelling killer. So much so that he has lost his job, has no relationship with his daughter and is living out of his car. He claims to be a private investigator but his sole case is finding out who the killer is.
He searches lists of previous victims and finds a pattern but needs an address to get the key to unlock the whole theory.
When he tells this theory to Holt, though, Holt dismisses it and tries to convince Lockhart to get help. Lockhart says he will, hugs his brother-in-law, but uses the chance to pickpocket him.
Lockhart uses the badge to impersonate Holt and get an address on a victim's wife.
He learns that the victim's husband ran a right-wing extremist fringe political group called the Real America Movement, who secret their propaganda into random books to be read by unsuspecting people. She tells Lockhart that his previous girlfriend ran the group, too.
He goes to find the mystery woman, but she's dead – killed in the same manner as the previous victims. He chases the killer from the house, he wounds her hand, follows her through a tunnel into a mysterious cave where she climbs into a time machine. It fills up with water before vanishing.
As he climbs out, Lockhart is confronted by a crowd of cops who arrest him on the spot.
It's 2015! Lockhart's daughter Amy is pregnant and heading to the hospital. She leaves her estranged father a message, asking him to come to the hospital to be with her.
Meanwhile, the physicist who Lockhart couldn't find in 2006 has resurfaced as a crazed scientist determined to stop Lockhart from undoing his work by catching the killer.
But Lockhart escapes and tracks the killer down. She reveals her name is Rya, and she is, in fact, his granddaughter. Rya tells him that she comes from the future, where Lockhart is the one who convinces her to take the job.
But what is the job?
Rya travels back through time in reverse chronological order to kill the exact right people to stop a bomb that goes off in 2024 and kickstarts a civil war in America.
Lockhart tries to convince her to quit and reveals to her that he causes her death in 1988.
But she refuses to quit, instead encouraging him to reunite with his daughter so he can have a part in both of their lives. If you go with the whole time-travel thing, however, this must by necessity happen otherwise Rya would never have a grandfather to convince her to take the job in the first place.
Lockhart lets her go and then heads to the hospital. He is seen holding his baby granddaughter as she narrates the story of successfully averting the terrorist attack and civil war that was supposed to ensue.
PHEW. Does your head hurt, too? Don't ask us how the time travel works or what the moon has to do with it, it's never explained and we don't know. Still, at least it's not as confusing as Avengers: Endgame.
In the Shadow of the Moon is now playing on Netflix.
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Gabriella Geisinger
Gabriella Geisinger is a freelance journalist and film critic, and was previously Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy. She loves Star Wars, coming-of-age stories, thrillers, and true crime. A born and raised New Yorker, she also loves coffee and the colour black, obviously.
