The story follows a woman named Lola (Franka Potente) who needs to obtain 100,000 Deutsche Mark in twenty minutes to save the life of her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu).

Manni's boss Ronnie will kill him in 20 minutes unless he has the money, so he is preparing to rob a nearby supermarket to replace the funds.

Surrendering, Manni throws the money bag into the air, which startles a police officer who accidentally shoots Lola dead.

A furious Lola overhears the conversation, grabs a security guard's gun, holds her father hostage and robs the bank of 100,000 marks.

When police mistake her for a bystander, she is able to leave and meet with Manni in time and stop him from robbing a supermarket, but a speeding ambulance that Lola had distracted moments earlier fatally runs him over.

Lola leaps over the man and his dog, arriving at the bank earlier but not triggering an auto accident as she did the first two times.

The film touches on themes such as free will vs. determinism, the role of chance in people's destiny, and obscure cause-effect relationships.

Through brief flash-forward sequences of still images, Lola's fleeting interactions with bystanders are revealed to have surprising and drastic effects on their future lives, serving as concise illustrations of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which minor, seemingly inconsequential variations in any interaction can blossom into much broader results than is often recognized.

The film ultimately seems to favor a compatibilist philosophical view to the free will question as evidenced by the casino scene and by the final telephone booth scene in which the blind woman redirects Manni's attention to a passerby, which enables him to make an important choice near the film's climax.

The conflict in the plot is driven by the initial phone conversation following Lola being late, leading to their timing to be out of sync.

After the end of the first "episode", the bedside questioning by Lola reveals her dissatisfaction with the relationship, leading Manni to ask "Do you want to leave me?".

O'Sickey makes the argument that each repeated return to the day is driven by Lola's continual attempt to adjust Manni's timing.

The entirety of the film portrays Lola as "postmodern heroine who could leap over traditional time-constraints" giving the expectation that she ultimately would get what she wants.

[11] The soundtrack, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, and Reinhold Heil, includes numerous musical quotations of the sustained string chords of The Unanswered Question, an early 20th-century chamber ensemble work by American composer Charles Ives.

The techno soundtrack established dialectical relation between motifs of the movie: Rhythm, Repetition, and Interval among various spatio-temporal logics.

The site's critical consensus reads, "More fun than a barrel of Jean-Paul Sartre, pic's energy riffs on an engaging love story and really human performances while offering a series of what-ifs and a blood-stirring soundtrack.

The film has drawn numerous comparisons to Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance (1982), which also features three scenarios, the outcome of which depends on split-second timing.

In addition, the painting on the back wall of the casino of a woman's head seen from behind is based on a shot in Vertigo: Tykwer disliked the empty space on the wall behind the roulette table and commissioned production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo.

Majora's Mask was released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64 to universal acclaim from critics, and is widely considered one of the best video games ever made.