The Timekeepers of Eternity is made up entirely of footage from 1995’s TV movie/miniseries The Langoliers, but far from being a fan edit, or a mere streamlining of the original’s three hour runtime, The Timekeepers of Eternity is an astoundingly original work. The film was made by printing every frame of The Langoliers onto paper, allowing filmmaker Aristotelis Maragkos to create bold new images and edits from the existing frames. 

The plot, based on a short story by Stephen King, remains the same. We meet a number of disparate characters taking a red-eye flight from LA to Boston as they arrive at the airport and board. Shortly thereafter they all fall asleep, and when they wake up, they find their fellow passengers have disappeared.

The story expands when the characters land at an airport in Maine and theorize that they have somehow traveled through a rip in time, and are existing in the past. A past unlike anything conceived of in other time travel fiction though, a past that is empty of all life, and of time itself. And to make things worse, one of the passengers, Craig Toomey (Bronson Pinchot) becomes violent in his desperation, and another, blind girl Dinah (Kate Maberly) can hear something threatening growing ever closer to them. 

As with many Stephen King adaptations, there are fascinating concepts, significant dread, and a number of outright thrilling sequences here, and of course some credit goes to original director Tom Holland, who also directed the first Child’s Play movie. But the real star of The Timekeepers of Eternity is the form. 

Maragkos is incredibly creative with his collage work. Images literally rip through one another. New images that mimic what would generally be achieved through double exposure, are created by overlaying different pieces of paper; sometimes only two, sometimes up to five or six. Similarly Maragkos uses the collage format to create new split screen sequences. That these techniques are then tied into the world and narrative of the film at some moments when Toomey rips sheets of paper to self-soothe is only more impressive. 

More simply than these edits, sometimes during moments of great drama and stress, the paper of the frame will wrinkle at the edges, and sometimes they will fully disappear as a sheet is entirely crumpled. 

It’s as if Maragkos and his collaborators brainstormed every possible image and edit they could create, leading to moments in The Timekeepers of Eternity that are truly jaw dropping in their creativity. 

That the form of the film doesn’t distract from the narrative, and in fact enhances the intellectual and emotional impact, is perhaps the film’s greatest trick. The form allows parts of images to remain, quite literally stuck in time, while other aspects move on. The rips of paper can create rips in time as they take us forward and backward, and sometimes both at the same time. 

As the film goes on and we learn of Toomey’s intrusive thoughts of an abusive father, these thoughts (shown as flashbacks in the original) are rendered as intruding on the world of the film as Toomey grows more anxious. They tear through the fabric of his reality, ripping apart his world, and sometimes even his head. 

When the film reaches its climax the form does too. Without spoiling anything (because it is still a genuinely exciting and mysterious story), suffice to say that up to this point everything within the world of The Timekeepers of Eternity has been portrayed using images from The Langoliers and this changes. It’s genuinely awe inspiring for a film, especially one that barely cracks an hour runtime, to continue to push itself further at nearly every step, and that continual formal experimentation makes for a truly disturbing finale to the story, one that was not available to the original film.