Temporal Ethics

“Why Time Feels Broken In Auntrolye & Why It Has To Be”

Auntrolye does not operate on linear time, it reorganizes time as perception. 

This isn't a stylistic flourish, nor is it time travel. It is the structural enforcement of how a character’s mind experiences reality. Time bends in Auntrolye not because the filmmaker chose to “play with memory,” but because the character’s internal understanding of events demands that bending. Chronology is no longer the narrative spine. Cognition is.

This manifests in sequences that feel out of order, not to confuse the viewer, but because the character’s emotional timeline has reordered them. For example, if a trauma once buried becomes freshly present in the character’s psyche, that moment will appear in the film not as flashback, but as current reality. The past is not “revisited”, it is relived. Similarly, realizations often land with delay. A seemingly calm scene might later fracture under the weight of a revelation, retroactively changing the tone of everything that came before it. Auntrolye forces time to become emotionally reactive.

This quality is best understood through the concept of perceptual gravity: memories and realizations do not stay fixed in chronological orbit. They fall into the narrative's present the moment they gain emotional weight in the character's psyche. The stronger the emotion, the more gravitational pull it exerts on the structure of the film.

Because of this, Auntrolye films do not unfold with conventional pacing. They unfold with cognitive pacing, time moves at the speed of recognition, repression, and memory collision. For the viewer, this means that every moment must be questioned not for its place in the plot, but for its relevance to the character’s understanding of self. You are not just watching what happened. You are watching what has become emotionally undeniable.

This is why Auntrolye is ethically opposed to objective time. It demands that the audience abandon the calendar and accept the fluid, often brutal, truth of emotional sequence. And by doing so, it doesn’t just bend time, it breaks the authority of time altogether.