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Time and Tide

Time and Tide

Feature Film · 88 pages · by Benjamin Cahan

A young man recounts the romantic story of the love of his life...the woman he met, fell in love with and married. So what's the problem? He's never met her.

Romance Fantasy Fantasy Love Story Supernatural

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Story

What happens
A crash victim falls for the nurse who treats him, then wakes up a year in his own past and spends the story hunting her down again, only to learn through her psychiatric tapes that they already lived out an entire marriage, his death, and her miscarriage in a future neither of them can prove happened, forcing them to decide whether to risk living it all again.
Genre
Romance
Subgenre
Supernatural / Magical Realism
Tone
Wistful, bar-stool confessional, tipping into fatalistic melodrama
Central conflict
Jacob's certainty that he and Vanessa are fated soul mates collides with Vanessa's terror that loving him again means repeating a marriage that ended in his death and her miscarriage.
Inciting incident
Jacob crashes his car and, while recovering in the hospital, falls for his nurse, Vanessa, who already has a boyfriend.

Character

Protagonist
A grieving, unshaven welder telling a bartender the story of the woman he insists is his soul mate
Want
To find and be with the nurse he believes he is fated to love, and to prove their bond is real rather than a delusion
Need
To accept uncertainty and love her without demanding proof or control over fate
Flaw
A stubborn, obsessive certainty that pushes past other people's boundaries instead of listening to them
Antagonist
There is no human villain; the opposing force is fate itself, embodied in the woman's terror of repeating a tragedy she has already lived once
Opposing force
A recurring cycle of love, marriage, death and breakdown that both of them half-remember and cannot verify or control
Personal stakes
Jacob risks being written off as delusional and losing Vanessa permanently; Vanessa risks reliving the breakdown, institutionalization and grief she barely survived once already
External stakes
Kevin loses the woman he proposed to, and Vanessa's professional and mental stability are jeopardized by her institutionalization

The 7 main characters have been added to this script’s Characters list, with whatever the script gave us about each of them. Open one to change anything or to fill in the rest.

Structure

Midpoint
A private investigator locates Vanessa institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital and hands Jacob cassette tapes of her therapy sessions, which reveal an entire shared future he has no memory of living.
Climax
After a second car crash sends Jacob back to the hospital, he wakes to find Vanessa as his nurse again -- but this time she remembers everything, including his death, and must decide whether to let him go a second time.
Ending
Vanessa stops the taxi taking Jacob away, kisses him, and chooses to try again despite knowing how it ended before; they drive off together having agreed to 'screw fate' and find each other if the cycle repeats, leaving the mechanism of the loop itself unexplained by design.

Act turns

  • Act One break ~p25
    After a whirlwind hospital romance and a wedding, Jacob wakes up a year in his own past, in bed with his ex-girlfriend Carrie, realizing the marriage he just lived through hasn't happened yet.
  • Act Two break ~p60
    Listening to Vanessa's therapy tapes, Jacob learns the marriage he can't remember past the wedding ended with his death in a construction accident and her subsequent miscarriage and institutionalization.

Themes

Fate versus free willLove as a wager against foreknowledge of lossThe unreliability of memory and premonitionIllusion versus reality (echoed by the magic-show scene)Grief: holding on versus letting go

Comparable titles

The Time Traveler's WifeEternal Sunshine of the Spotless MindAbout TimeThe Fountain

Key scenes

  • INT. BAR - NIGHT
    Establishes the frame device -- Jacob telling his story to Ray -- and plants the central mystery of a woman he hasn't met yet.
  • EXT. CITY STREET - NIGHT
    The car crash that puts Jacob in the hospital and sets the whole romance in motion.
  • INT. BEDROOM - DAY (Jacob opens his eyes in his old apartment)
    The story's central twist: Jacob has been thrown a year into his own past, turning a romance into a mystery about time and fate.
  • INT. JACOB'S CAR - DRIVING (first therapy tape)
    Jacob begins hearing Vanessa's account of a shared future he has never lived, seeding dramatic irony for the rest of the film.
  • EXT. HOSPITAL COURTYARD - PRESENT - DAY
    Vanessa reveals the full tragedy -- their marriage, his death, her miscarriage -- delivering the story's gut-punch and its darkest point.
  • EXT. HOSPITAL - FRONT DOOR
    Vanessa stops the taxi and chooses Jacob again, resolving the film's emotional argument even as the metaphysical loop stays unexplained.
What was unclear: The script never clarifies the mechanism behind the time-slip -- literal time travel, precognition, shared delusion, or reincarnation are all suggested but none confirmed, and the final scene implies the cycle may repeat again without saying so outright. This ambiguity reads as a deliberate choice (the characters explicitly promise to 'find each other' if it happens again) rather than an oversight, but a reader should know the film ends on emotional resolution without metaphysical explanation.

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