Once more, to the time loop, my friends once more!
While that is pretty much the raison d’etre of this particular genre of film, of which Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow are likely the most well known examples, there can be a little foreboding about the fact that we will once again be repeating the same day over and over again to either brilliantly existential effect … or not.
Very much not, in some cases.
Thankfully, what you don’t get in the brilliantly-realised Palm Springs, directed by Max Barbakow to a screenplay by Andy Siara, is the grinding sense of repetition that can characterise the lesser members of this genre which offers all kinds of possibilities for the character to undergo some kind of life changing epiphany, remake themselves for the better and perhaps even fall in love.
While all that self-realisation shouldn’t necessarily be directed to falling deeply and headlong in love, that often what happens to the protagonist who is either caught in the loop with someone else – optimal since as one of the characters in Palm Springs observes at one point, who wants to go through something like this alone? – or works hard to convince someone they’re not crazy and they are trapped in the same suffocating sliver of time and can’t help but get closer to their fellow anomaly occupier.
In Palm Springs, Nyles (Andy Samberg) does indeed fall in love – not a spoiler; that is obvious from the trailer a mile off but this film is all about the journey, with the destination pretty much a pleasurable but foregone conclusion – but it’s how that all comes to be that is the source of a great deal of joy and delight and a metric ton of ribald hilarity.
It all begins at a wedding in, you guessed it, Palm Springs, where Nyles is clearly not thrilled to be out in the desert with his girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner) who is consumed with looking good on the day over spending any sort of actual quality time with the man she supposedly loves.
Newsflash: she really does not, and at the wedding she is consumed with her role as bridesmaid to the exclusion of everything else, essentially sidelining the maid of honour, the bride’s older sister Sarah (Christin Milioti) who is really only worried about drinking a lot and trying to make to the other end of the reception with her sanity, if not her liver, intact.
You might argue that weddings are a form of existential nightmare for the guests without peer, and in this case, you’d be right except for the fact that Nyles, clad in swimmers and a red tropical shirt, seems to be suddenly having the time of his life.
Unconcerned with propriety, either sartorial or behavioural, Nyles seems to know exactly where people will be on the dancefloor, how many drinks to order and when, and is breezily unconcerned with what he says or does, going so far as to hijack the maid of honour’s speech to devastatingly brilliant effect.
Nyles is indeed in the time loop, having relived November 9, the day of the ill-fated wedding over and over again, breeding him in a kind of fatalistic acceptance of events and devil may care attitude that intrigues Sarah enough to accompany him to the desert for some illicit sex. (Nyles is not a cad by the way; turns out Misty makes this kind of betrayal a whole lot easier with her reception shenanigans.)
What follows is not much coital bliss as time loop freakiness as Sarah follows Nyles into a cave after he is shot a number of times with industrial strength arrows by a man who clearly means to do him harm.
Of course, you can’t die in a time loop – it seems to be one of the unwritten laws and isn’t violated here to hilarious and occasionally horrifying effect – and so the next morning Nyles wakes up in his bed in the same manner as every other morning, but then, for the first time, so does Sarah who is freaked out, and fair enough too, to discover she is caught in the same time loop.
At this point, Palm Springs can go one of two ways – laugh out silly where this most unusual of premises is played for every visual and verbal gag possible (fun in the right hands but it can often overstay its welcome) or comically thoughtful, an exploration what happens to someone in a place and limited time where nothing they do matters.
Thankfully for us, the film takes option B and we are treated to a carefully told tale of one man’s grim acceptance of his repetitious fate, one woman’s fight to escape hers followed by the same nihilistic what-the-hell attitude of her time anomaly companion and how they somehow, in-between dying in inventive ways – at one point Nyles asks Roy (J. K Simmons), the other person caught in the loop and the one with the vengeful arrows, to kill him because he can’t be bothered driving back to Palm Springs – find a way to get on with their lives.
Palm Springs has the usual comic set pieces you’d expect from a film that is happy to play the concept for laughs to highly intelligent, impressively funny effect.
That is however, not all it does, and Nyles realises there might be some point to investing himself emotionally inn life because Sarah is now with him, and Sarah, essentially the black sheep of her family who is rudderless and directionless to a soul-destroying degree (not that she’d admit it between drinks), grudgingly begins to accept that Nyles might help her make life “a little less mundane” (“That’s a low bar,” he says. “It’s a great place to start!”)
In its clever, unique and highly affecting way, Palm Springs manages to be about three genres at once, executing on each other so consummately well that as you’re laughing at the screwball comedy, you’re contemplating the meaning of life and existence and marvelling at the power of love to survive pretty much anything.
The film is refreshing too because it refuses to let the guy save the day; quite how Sarah rescues them from the time loop-iness of it all is best left to this highly entertaining, soulful film, but suffice to say while Nyles is all about giving into the nihilism of it all (and then not), with Sarah joining him for some of that fun-filled but ultimately empty ride, Sarah eventually decides to do something about it.
All that, and quite a bit more thoughtful examination of the human condition make Palm Springs a more than worthy new entry in the film as it balances laugh out loud jokes with philosophical musing, cringeworthy moments and a gnawing sense that life might be one long glitchy simulation from which no escape is possible, but if it is, you want the person beside you to be the one who slips the joint with you and who hopefully starts this crazy thing called life all over again