Trailer: 

Imagine discovering that the hallway outside your apartment never ends, or that the empty highway you’re speeding down loops infinitely back on itself. The Incident begins with two petty criminals fleeing a botched heist through a Mexico City stairwell while a detective gives chase. Mid-pursuit, all three realize the staircase has become an impossible Möbius strip—floor numbers climb forever, windows show the same gray sky, and the exit door is always just one flight above. Water bottles, emotions, and sanity run out in equal measure as months, then years, pass inside this architectural nightmare.

Parallel to their ordeal, a young family—parents Sandra and Roberto with two squabbling kids—sets off for a beach vacation. Minutes after hitting the open road, they stop for gas, only to find every station abandoned, every mile marker repeating. The asphalt seems to heal behind their tire tracks; no matter how fast they drive, they keep returning to the same lone billboard and the same mangled armadillo in the gutter. When the car stereo switches to a news broadcast dated years in the future, they grasp the horrifying truth: time is marching on outside their loop, but they are trapped in a pocket universe where only their bodies age.

Writer-director Isaac Ezban braids these two timelines with mathematical precision. Clues hidden in grocery receipts, scar tissue, and shifting constellations reveal that the stairwell and the highway are fractal fragments of one colossal experiment—an experiment that may have begun with a single traumatic “incident” decades earlier. As birthdays accumulate, children grow into adults who barely recall the outside world, and grudges calcify into lethal vendettas. Yet tiny anomalies—a shattered picture frame that suddenly repairs itself, a forgotten inhaler that appears in both realities—hint at a glitch the prisoners might exploit.

When the surviving characters finally collide across dimensions, the film detonates into an existential puzzle: are they pawns in a cosmic simulation, or the authors of their own prison? With nerve-tight editing and chilly, pastel lighting, The Incident turns mundane spaces—a staircase, a minivan, a convenience-store aisle—into arenas of cosmic dread. The result is a mind-bending, time-loop thriller that probes the lengths to which people will go to reclaim agency, forgive the unforgivable, and break free—even if freedom requires tearing the fabric of reality itself. Fans of Primer and Triangle will relish piecing together every breadcrumb of this haunting labyrinth.

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