It’s been a while since we had a variant of the Groundhog Day formula on film and this one actually manages to be rather good. It is a romantic comedy as well but changes things up by having both people being included in the loop and that allows this to be a far less solipsistic experience. At the same time it feels much more science-fiction with characters who experiment to find out the limitations and boundaries of the loop they are trapped in.

Nyles is a time loop where he wakes up every morning at Palm Springs where he supposed to be attending a wedding with friends of his girlfriend Misty. He has spent so much time in the loop that he has forgotten what his life before that was like and is content to spend his time lazing around and getting drunk. One night after he gets together with the maid of honor Sarah who is the bride’s sister, he is attacked and pursued by a man wielding a bow. He flees and Sarah out of concern follows him into a cave. A force pulls them in and Sarah wakes up on the morning of the same day, now part of the loop as well. She tries various means of escaping loop but as Nyles tells her, nothing works. Time passes normally so long as she is awake but as soon she falls asleep, or dies, she wakes back up on the same morning. Nyles also explains that the man who attacked him is Roy, another person who he brought into the loop in the same way and comes to torture him from time to time as revenge. Sarah joins in on Nyles’ hedonistic existence for a while but her determination to escape is renewed out of guilt as she wakes up every morning in the bed of the groom, the soon to be husband of her sister.

Without the time loop aspect, this would be a rather mediocre romantic comedy with somewhat sub-par acting. It’s clear however that the scriptwriter gave plenty of thought to working out the rules of the time loop so they are mostly consistent and the dialogue has some fun moments. I love the contrasting attitudes of the two main characters about being trapped. Sarah has her own reasons for wanting to escape and it is so great to have her study everything that she possibly can and perform her own experiments to understand the loop better. The loop in Groundhog Day seems to have been an act of God to teach Phil a lesson but here it’s just physics and being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Both Nyles and Sarah have lessons of their own to learn as well but this doesn’t magically give them a way out here. It’s great to see so many crazy and fun ideas they throw in here and how quickly they realize that only those in on the loop are real people with agency and memory. A lot of this stuff have been used in many pieces of fiction, especial web fiction, but they’re very novel in film form.

Another great sign about how the writers took the scenario seriously is that the characters debate what it means philosophically to be inside a loop. Nyles thinks that life before the loop no longer means anything and only what happens in the loop does. He does refrain from going around on a killing spree for fun, not because of what it does to the victims but because of what that experience would do to himself. Sarah however believes that the person that they were before entering the loop still shapes who they are. It actually is rather tempting to take Nyles’ side here in simply giving in and enjoying the effective immortality of the loop. I suppose it’s possible to be bored with everything eventually as the entire universe feels so static but they have as much of the world as they can reach available to them before the need to sleep becomes irresistible. But the really big problem is the sheer loneliness of such an existence. To me that makes Roy’s acceptance of his fate horrible. No matter how much he loves his family, he will still get tired of them eventually as they cannot ever change. Hopefully the mid-credits scene at the end means Sarah and Nyles don’t leave them hanging.

All in all, this is excellent work and is a very worthy addition to the still small collection of time loop films. It is well thought out and having Sarah along as a protagonist makes all the difference as Nyles by himself would be pretty horrible. Highly recommended.