The Second Law

A tense two-hander in which a cup of coffee cools and the universe wins, again. Where most films build to a confrontation, The Second Law opens with the result already decided and spends its running time showing you why nobody could have stopped it. The coffee never had a chance. Neither, it turns out, does anything else.

The script is thermodynamics stripped of equations: heat flows from hot to cold, order becomes disorder, and every attempt to reverse this costs more than it recovers. The film's great trick is to make this feel personal. You will watch an ice cube melt and take it as a comment on your own week.

There are weaknesses. The antagonist, entropy, has no face and no dialogue, and the film's insistence that it is in every room can feel like a shrug dressed as a theme. A late sequence involving a perpetual motion machine is played for laughs that land, but the machine does not.

Still, no other law of physics has been filmed with this much patience. Stay for the ending, which is also the beginning, which is also the heat death of everything, which is also fine.