Our Times is a mixed bag of budding potential and flattening cartoonishness, a fundamentally well-performed but poorly thought-out time travel rom-com. In 1966, in Mexico City, a madly in love scientist and university professor couple, Nora (Lucero) and Héctor (Benny Ibarra), embark on their final steps to fulfilling a massive dream: creating a fully functional time machine that only works when a wormhole opens once every thirty years. Once they obtain the last needed parts and conduct a test run planned to land them 15 minutes in the future, they quickly realize they’ve miscalculated and get stuck with a defunct machine in 2025. Engaging with the “world of today”—cell phones, new outlooks, different social norms, and AC are just a few of their time-jumped discoveries—and re-engaging with familiar faces such as Nora’s once-star student and now-university Dean Julia (Ofelia Medina) and her great great niece Alondra (Renata Vaca), the pair devise plans to fix the machine and jump back in time. Unfortunately, an untimely wedge shoves itself between Nora and Héctor as today’s world rapidly changes each one’s priorities, driving them decades apart from each other, even if the physical distance is only mere inches.

More often than not, Our Times is humorously sweet, and it’s best to focus on the hilarity of it all. It contains significant time travel functionality issues, breaking many cinematic time travel golden rules to help or hinder its central duo, making it necessary to treat that component as the catalyst to the pair’s more personal experiences rather than a central element to nitpick. In other words, it should be clear: Our Times is a rom-com, not a sci-fi flick, and from that angle there is as much to enjoy as there is to sour over. Both singer-songwriters, Lucero and Ibarra, for example, are magnificently bubbly in their roles without sacrificing the integrity of their characters. While an innate melodramatic undertone often thins the narrative down—watching the pair gaze through different windows in supposed states of self-reflection not ten feet apart from each other under a somber verse of (presumably) one of the pair’s real-world songs can be dull as dirt—their charisma and individual senses of star power march through it all. “Never… will I cease to admire your beautiful eyes, Nora,” an ear-to-ear smiling, almost squint-eyed says tenderly to his wife, whose big brown pupils melt down her cheeks. Together, they’re magnetized best friends, making for an enjoyable time whenever they engage with each other. They laugh with flamboyance, live with flair, and fight with passion, even as they find themselves increasingly at odds with each other’s world views.

Such worldviews and the near-subtle hints towards current socio-political trends and norms form a backbone in what else would be a generic Netflix skip. The most consistent and unpredictable component of the film is its metaphorization of time. In 1966, Nora is seen as the underling or assistant to her husband (even though she’s the pair’s intellectual powerhouse by far) because she’s a woman. In a monotone demeanor, she even briskly tells her positionally comfortable husband off at one point when they get ridiculed by their time machine’s unacknowledged financer: “Sure, he’s an idiot, but you don’t stand up to him. I’m not saying pick a fight with him, but at least show him you value my role.”

Such a demonstration of Héctor’s comfort with the unequal status quo is reinforced in 2025, when Nora receives numerous offers while her now unknown husband is left behind. Instead of communicating effectively with Nora about his concerns, he eventually retreats into what he knows as he drunkenly tells a new friend how “The old days were when everyone knew who they were. Don’t get me wrong, okay? I totally agree that there should be more opportunities for women… [but] guys like us are the fucking devil,” after having attempted to hijack a featured panel where she was to speak to tell the women in the crowd how they should behave. Representative of the toxic masculinity and restrictive traditionality that many parts of the patriarchally dominated world face, and Héctor being stuck in the past, the pair comes to the most painless conclusion: Héctor must go back to where he belongs, and Nora must stay in 2025, where she belongs. While an obtuse final scene deflates the overall message, their time together as they realize they need to live in different times and spend time apart makes their love both a fierce force and Our Times‘ most fiery component to see unroll. They separate partly because they know what’s best for each other, making their mutual split as tragic as it is kind.

Thus, while Our Times is nevertheless severely undercut by simplistic dialogue, cartoonish undercurrents about the future’s changes from the past’s perspectives, and an entirely implausible time travel logic, it has enough star power, unpredictability, heart, and humor to surprisingly please. For rom-com fans, fans of either of these singers, and Netflix original fans, Our Times is a fine way to spend YOUR time, even if it’s got quite a lot of issues.

Streaming on Netflix now