Dante is a man who fast-forwards through his own life. Decider describes a middle-aged corporate drone who tunes out his family and skips mentally past the biggest moments of his life, and Ready Steady Cut adds that he works flat out now because he thinks it will buy him time later. Still Time, Alessandro Aronadio’s 2023 film, then hands him a life that really does skip.

The setup is simple. Dante (Edoardo Leo) kisses Alice (Barbara Ronchi) by accident, and the two end up engaged. After a surprise party for his fortieth birthday he wakes up a year later with no memory of what happened in between, and he learns that Alice is pregnant. Then it happens again. According to Decider, every few hours he skips ahead another year without knowing that any time has passed, while everyone around him carries on as if he had been on autopilot all along. Decider adds, in a parenthesis, that this is basically how he already lived. It is the sharpest idea in the premise: the magic does not invent a new problem, it exaggerates what Dante does of his own free will every morning.

Decider files the film next to Click, About Time and Groundhog Day, and the comparison is fair. A man learns to value his minutes by losing control of them, and we have seen that lesson before. What Aronadio and his co-writer Renato Sannio change is the type of man: not a lovable slob but a corporate drone who treats time as money. Decider puts it neatly: for a calculating capitalist, hell is not other people, hell is losing control of time. The stakes are small and domestic, and the film works best when it admits as much.

Leo’s job is to look genuinely astonished, and he does it well. Decider notes that everything in Still Time is played low-key and lifelike, so nothing registers as showy acting, and that Leo deserves credit for selling a magical realist premise with little more than his own incredulous reactions. Ready Steady Cut recalls how Dante is baffled by Alice’s swollen stomach and gets scared when he feels the baby move. That is a man frightened by a fact everyone else has had months to absorb. The scene is funny first, and it then becomes the earliest sign of what he has lost.

The daughter is the real subject. Ready Steady Cut reports that Dante jumps forward and finds a baby girl he keeps mistaking for a son, and that sometimes he forgets she exists at all. That review calls the confusion hysterical, and it is, until you count how many of her early years he has missed. By the scene Decider singles out, she is Galadriel, played by Stella Trotta at the age of five to seven, and she can answer him back. The name is a Lord of the Rings homage that Decider calls risible, though it admits the film gives good reason for it. Dante is finally spending real time with her and asks, almost like a manager requesting feedback from an employee, what he could do better. “More time, please,” she says. Decider calls the reply simple and devastating, and it lands because Dante cannot turn it into a task or a target.

Ronchi has the harder job. According to Ready Steady Cut, Alice resents him for never being with their daughter and for preferring work to his family, and the couple is in therapy, which Dante forgets after each jump. Ronchi has to play a grievance that her partner, thanks to the leaps, cannot remember causing. The same review points to the pain and frustration Dante feels because he does not remember these mistakes, and that is where the film comes closest to real drama. Decider also notes Alice’s frisky, reference-laden attempts to get Dante in the mood, which never go beyond foreplay. They are a pleasant human touch, and little more.

The problem is the rhythm. Decider says the film mostly plods along without much strong mood or feeling beyond general situational tension and overall pleasantness, and I agree. The logline calls it a dramedy, a label that usually promises a swing between belly laughs and belly-aches. Still Time rarely swings. It hums along at a polite middle temperature, a nice movie about nice people learning to get in touch with their inner niceness, to borrow Decider’s line. The structure of jump, bewilderment and catch-up is built to repeat, and repetition is exactly where a mild tone starts to wear thin.

The wider cast includes Francesca Cavallin as Francesca, Mario Sgueglia as Valerio, Raz Degan as Omar and Massimo Wertmüller as Marcello, with Andrea Purgatori as the therapist. With the story pinned to Dante’s lurching point of view, the supporting players are seen mostly through how they treat him. That suits the premise and costs the film some texture.

The last stretch has Dante scrambling to repair what he broke and to prove his love to Alice, as Ready Steady Cut describes it. It is predictable, and Aronadio, as Decider says, does nothing particularly novel with the time-bending premise. Even so, the claustrophobia that Auralcrave finds in this man’s journey comes through in the better scenes: someone trapped in a life that keeps moving without him.

Still Time is pleasant company with one sharp idea, and Leo makes that idea believable. It is gentler than its subject deserves. Of everything in it, the exchange between Dante and Galadriel that Decider quotes is the one moment I would keep.