‘Run Lola Run’ is an inventive, kinetic live action variation on a video game universe with the heroine running at speed through the streets of a German city with just twenty minutes on the clock to find DM100,000 or else her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) will be killed by the gangsters to whom he has to give the money. What works so incisively is the way we are given three different variations of the same story, with the difference of just one second crucially changing the outcome.

In one sequence, for example, Lola (Franka Potente) trips over a dog while she is running out of her apartment, and as a result she arrives in her father’s office a moment later than she did in the first sequence, by which time her father and one of his staff in the bank where he works have reached a different conversational plateau, which leads to a completely contrary outcome for Lola when she pleads with her father to give him the money on the spot.

In some of the timelines Lola gets killed, in others Manni dies, and in some she gets the money, or he does, but there are so many variations of chance and randomness on display this could be seen as the inspiration for the spate of ‘Final Destination’ films which began two years after ‘Run Lola Run’ was made which also questions whether we can cheat fate or destiny and whether we are really in control of our own narratives and lives. We hear in voiceover the existential questions of who we are and what we believe and what the inevitability of death brings to our lives, with chaos theory specifically referenced.

Whether Lola runs into a car or the car stops before running her over is a case in point… and, as with the ‘Final Destination’ films, ‘Run Lola Run’ is ingenious at positing that even if on one occasion the car stops without crashing into another, the driver may not be quite so lucky just a few minutes later, as if he is destined to have an accident that day. Each time someone dies the quest starts afresh, like in a video game universe, and although the film mixes a variety of film styles – animation, video, 35mm stock, etc. – this is a clever attempt to use the structure of a video game to ask deeper questions for the audience to think through than a much longer film (this one only clocks in at 80 minutes) would be able to do.

We, the audience, feel viscerally caught up in Lola’s world – this is the most interactive of film iterations, where the line between playing a game and watching a movie has been blurred. This is the butterfly effect rendered into a film narrative, and it is an inventive film for showing us how a minor detail or character in one version can prove to be crucial in an unexpected way to what later transpires.