From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Counterclockwise
For alternative interpretations of temporality in Beach Surgery, see Against the Spin.
The film's relationship to conventional narrative time is disputed; see Talk:Counterclockwise.
Plot
Counterclockwise radically reorders Beach Surgery's temporal structure by telling the story in *reverse chronological sequence*, beginning with the ending and moving toward the beginning. The result is a neo-noir detective film where the mystery is not "what will happen?" but "what has happened?"
The film opens on a desert road at sunrise. A man (Leif) in a Hawaiian shirt sits in a wheelchair, bandaged eyes, hand cannon in his lap. A woman (Katita) in nurse-and-assassin hybrid dress stands over him, laughing and then screaming — but in the film's logic, this is the end. The camera rewinds; we watch Katita's laugh *become* a scream, then become laughter again, then freeze. Then the scene begins to move forward through time in a new direction.
The second half works backward: Leif, miraculously whole and mobile, drives a jeep through the desert. He is solving a mystery — trying to understand how he arrived at this moment, trying to retrace his steps to the cause of his current state. Katita acts as his co-investigator and guide, but she is evasive. When he asks a direct question, she responds with a non-answer that somehow *proves* he already knows.
Leif: Why am I in this desert? How did I get here?— Midpoint
Katita: You're driving a jeep, aren't you? You got here in a jeep.— Midpoint
Scenes repeat — the service station, the radio igloo, the watering hole — but in each iteration, Leif is slightly *less* injured. Eyes clear. Heart stabilizes. Legs strengthen. The viewer realizes: the film is not showing Leif's journey forward; it is showing his *recovery*, moving backward in time.
The climax: Leif arrives at the underground pool in Newcastle, and finds himself standing over his own unconscious body. He is the one who pulled himself from the water. He is the one who began the cycle. Katita appears beside him:
Katita: Now you remember. Now you can drive me away again.— The final scene
The film's actual ending remains ambiguous about whether Leif is solving a mystery or *creating* one. Did he remember, or is he forgetting in reverse? The glitch, in this adaptation, is temporal rather than spatial: the two halves of Beach Surgery cannot connect because they move in opposite temporal directions. Time itself refuses reconciliation.
Reception
Initial audiences found the reverse-chronology disorienting; some left screenings. Critics praised Mendoza's formal rigor and the film's [citation needed] meditative pacing. It has become a touchstone for discussions of Adaptation and impossibility.“She has made a film that plays the glitch like an instrument, rather than trying to hide it.”