‘See You Yesterday:’ A Teen Time Travel Movie About a Police Shooting That Weirdly Works

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, See You Yesterday on Netflix is a teen time travel film about a police shooting of an unarmed black man, and yes, that’s a pretty odd combination of words. Yet somehow, the film pulls off both a meaningful commentary on systematic violence against black people and a time-travel plot that, honestly, made a hell of a lot more sense to me than Avengers: Endgame. The result is a refreshingly original and fiercely relevant film that’s a lot of fun to watch.

See You Yesterday—which debuts on Netflix May 17 following a premiere at Tribeca Film Festival last month—comes from first-time director Stefon Bristol. Bristol, who co-wrote the script with Fredrica Bailey, originally filmed a short of the same name, and with the help of his mentor and former New York University professor, Spike Lee (who produced the film) turned it into a feature-length sci-fi film. The story takes place in Bristol’s hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where two teen geniuses C.J. (Eden Duncan-Smith) and Sebastian (Dante Crichlow) are testing out their newly-invented time machines (which are actually just backpacks connected to iPhones via plastic tubing). Within the first five minutes, we get a cameo from Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox, who plays the kids’ teacher and winkingly exclaims, “Time travel. Great Scott!”

Once the corny cameos are out of the way, Bristol wastes no time layering in the more serious side of his story. When C.J. and her brother Calvin (played by actor/rapper Brian “Stro” Bradley) are arguing on a street corner, they are immediately approached by police who demand to see Calvin’s ID. Everyone’s on edge, we learn, because an officer recently shot and killed a young black man named Francis Pierre in the neighborhood.

This doesn’t feel like an abrupt tone shift—it feels natural. Perhaps that’s a sad testament to the reality of what it means to be young, black and American in 2019: These are kids who are living their lives, joking with friends, and coming home to news of yet another fatal police shooting, of which there were 992 nationwide in 2018. For C.J., that statistic becomes personal when it’s her brother Calvin who gets shot by an officer who mistakes him for a bodega burglar. With the help of Sebastian, C.J. is determined to travel back in time as many times as it takes to undo the tragedy that befell her family.

Not everything in See You Yesterday works. It has that first-film feel to it: Some of the dialogue, particularly the time travel jibber jabber, is stilted and some of the shots feel unnecessarily fanciful. Unless Bristol makes a sequel, audiences will undoubtedly be left dissatisfied by the ending.  But Duncan-Smith, who had a small role in the 2014 Annie film, has a natural charm about her, and her easy rapport with Crichlow is funny and believable. Unlike Avengers: Endgame, which insists you can’t change the past except for sometimes when you can, See You Yesterday has fun with the butterfly effect in ways that produce some gasp-inducing twist and turns. Still, it never loses sight of its emotional core: C.J.’s relationship with her brother.

But for me, the real enjoyment was in following the characters’ daily lives around East Flatbush, one of the few Brooklyn neighborhoods that’s yet to give way to gentrification. (According to a 2015 report, 89 percent of the population in East Flatbush is black, and, because of the large population of immigrants from Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica and more, the neighborhood has been dubbed “Little Caribbean.”) Like Lee with Bed-Stuy in 1989’s Do the Right Thing, it’s clear Bristol knows his way around the neighborhood, and he knows exactly how to capture it on film. From the red slushies that C.J. and Sebastian buy at the Mini Mart to the Jamaican salesman who yells at them for making too much noise in the alleyway, See You Yesterday‘s authenticity is palpable, even for someone who grew up in a white, rural Midwestern town (that’s me). And rather than remake Do the Right Thing—or Back to the Future, for that matter—Bristol has created something entirely new, and that’s damn refreshing.

Stream See You Yesterday on Netflix