Our Times review: A tale of freedom, time travel, and the weight of coming back

In Our Times, two physicists from 1966 Mexico, Nora Cervantes and Héctor Esquivel, launch themselves 59 years into the future. What was meant to be a brief scientific leap becomes something else entirely when they land in a world that no longer resembles the one they left. 2025 doesn’t just challenge their intellect. It dismantles everything they believed about progress, power, and identity.

The convenience store, the cell phone, and the myth of modernity

In Our Times, the couple's first contact with the future is fluorescent and disorienting: a convenience store, glowing with artificial light and crowded with silent strangers moving through digital routines. The noise isn’t loud, but the world is. Nothing looks familiar. Cell phones, in particular, strike them as sinister. To Nora and Héctor, these devices seem less like tools and more like instruments of hypnosis. And maybe they are. People don’t speak. They scroll. They don’t look. They consume.

But then the film shifts the mirror. Back in 1966, streets were lined with men buried in newspapers, tuning out the world just the same. You must have seen this picture. Now, the medium might have changed, but the habit endured. Our Times doesn’t blame technology. It questions what we’ve always done with it and what that says about us.

Scene from Our Times | Image via: Netflix

Desire, control, and the body she reclaims

One of the most pivotal scenes in Our Times never actually appears on screen. Nora, freshly arrived in 2025, is taken by her grandniece Alondra to a modern sex shop. What we see is only the aftermath. She returns carrying her choices: vibrators, condoms, and lingerie. There is no embarrassment in her voice, only quiet delight. For the first time, she owns her body. Not as an act of rebellion, but as something long overdue.

Héctor isn’t disturbed by the items themselves. What unsettles him is the fact that she explored desire without him. His discomfort has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with possession. Nora’s autonomy exposes what was always there, buried under protocol and patriarchy. She was never really his. And now that she knows that too, there’s no turning back.

Our Times doesn’t frame this moment as provocation. It treats her pleasure and confidence as something natural, essential, and non-negotiable. Not liberation through spectacle, but through quiet certainty. Héctor watches the woman he once controlled become someone who no longer asks for permission.

A spotlight that was always hers

When the university invites Nora to present her research, she instinctively turns to Héctor. Old reflexes die hard. She begins to ask if he’ll join her, if she should share the stage. But the dean interrupts gently. The talk will be hers alone, scheduled for International Women’s Day. It should be a moment of pride. Instead, it lands like a bruise. Only then does Nora realize how much of her brilliance was buried under his name, his voice, his need to speak first. Our Times doesn't shy away from showing him bluntly denying her agency.

Héctor doesn’t hide his resentment. “And when is International Men’s Day?” he says, loud enough to be heard. There’s no curiosity in the question, only condescension. Later, as she delivers her talk, he interrupts repeatedly. Corrects her. Comments. He inserts himself into a space that, for once, doesn’t belong to him. At one point, he mutters, “Women, huh?” as if to remind everyone of the joke he used to be allowed to make.

But no one laughs. Not anymore. The room, full of women who recognize exactly what he is, goes quiet. Cold. He’s not the victim of a cultural shift. He’s its cautionary tale. Our Times makes us remember, with his discourse for Women's Day, how even nowadays some men think they can get away with the same infuriating words. It's so real it hurts.

When he takes the microphone at the event, he delivers a speech that reads like a eulogy for everything Nora has outgrown. He lists what a woman should be: firm, but not arrogant. Elegant, but restrained. Cheerful, but never loud. It’s the language of control, polished into poetry. And it lands like a slap.

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The soft violence of fragile men

What follows is worse than ridicule. Another man pulls Héctor aside to tell him that what happened was unfair. That it was “reverse sexism.” The phrase hangs in the air like smoke. It’s nauseating because it’s real. Because Héctor is not alone. There will always be someone ready to echo his wounded pride, to soothe his ego, to tell him he’s right for feeling left behind.

Then comes the final twist of the knife. Héctor tells Nora that she’s only seeing beauty in this future because it favors her. That she shouldn’t let her eyes adjust to this timeline. He says it like he’s trying to protect her, but the message is clear. He’s not worried for her. He’s afraid of her staying. Afraid she won’t need him to translate the world anymore. What he calls a warning is, in truth, a quiet threat. Our Times makes it clear in his aura, not only in his words.

Leaving is easy when the past still belongs to you

When Nora finally says she’s staying, Héctor doesn’t protest. He says he will return to 1966. That he belongs with the chauvinists and mediocrities. It isn’t tragic. It’s honest. He doesn’t want to change. He wants to remain the man he was in a world that still lets him be.

But even in leaving, he tries to shape the story. He writes her a letter, full of metaphors, regrets, and lyrical flourishes about time and destiny. He says she belongs to the future. That he understands now. That he supports her. But the subtext is loud. He didn’t leave for her. He left to keep control over what little narrative he had left.

And she doesn’t chase him. She doesn’t break. She stays. And the story, at last, becomes hers.

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In Our Times, the future doesn’t need permission

Thirty years later, Nora has built the machine again. Alone. Still brilliant. Still human. She has become one of the most celebrated physicists of her generation, earning international awards and transforming the field. She never remarried. She never stopped moving forward.

When she chooses to go back, not to 1966, but to 1996, where Héctor is old and softened by time, it isn’t because she needs him. It’s because she wants to see him one last time. They kiss. They share a moment that’s tender but already past. By then, the future is hers. Fully.

Our Times isn’t asking whether love can survive time travel. It’s asking what happens when love demands that one person stop growing. Nora didn’t. She outgrew the timeline, the man, and the silence. And she did it with grace, fury, and the kind of genius no one gets to claim but her.

Rating with a touch of flair: 4.5 time machines out of 5, humming with quantum potential and unapologetic feminism.

One half-point lost for how much Héctor is allowed to talk before finally being quiet. But everything else? Precise, emotional, radiant. Our Times is not a love story. It is a liberation chronicle, and Nora’s timeline is the only one worth following.