Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing is a splintered portrait of a destructive love affair told with Roeg’s signature flair and intensity. Thrown about like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the film’s various scenes defy cause-and-effect linear structure long before such narrative trickery was fashionable (read: long before Pulp Fiction). Told in chronological order, the scenes would add up to a not terribly original story of love gone bad. However, Roeg’s approach of artfully jumbling them together so that events in the past can more readily inflect those of the present imbues the film with an added sense of urgency and despair. While this makes the story hard to follow the first time around, virtually demanding that Bad Timing be seen more than once, each subsequent viewing rewards more than the one before.