Palm Springs (2020)

At their core, “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014) share the same major plot device: a character was stuck by themselves in a timeloop and the only way out was to perfect a series of actions in order to escape. At some point they had to convince someone else that they were repeating the same day over and over again and not just rambling shenanigans about predicting the next five minutes.

Which is why “Palm Springs” (2020) was so novel: Nyles (Andy Samberg) wasn’t alone.

Sorta.

The movie started out showing him moving through his day: he was just a guy who was clearly done with his relationship to the narcissistic Misty (Meredith Hagner) and wanted to do nothing more than to leave the venue of Palm Springs, where he was stuck attending a wedding as her plus-one for a couple he didn’t even know.

Sarah (Cristin Milioti) was the bride’s screw-up of a sister: divorced, a history of drug use, and constantly in her little sister’s shadow. Not a great place to be.
So when Sarah noticed that Nyles’ actions during the wedding reception were inexplicably flawless – going so far as to move a chair into place to catch a falling drunk without having to look – she got curious and followed him into the desert that surrounded the venue.

Through a plot device that made as much sense as anything in any other timeloop movie, Sarah also got looped, leaving her and Nyles stuck in a constantly-repeating window of time: approximately one day, reset by falling asleep or dying.

Obviously, Sarah was freaked out at first and tried all of the things that Nyles had attempted too – suicide, running away, staying awake, etc.
Then, like other movies in this niche genre, an unknown amount of time passed where the two just learned to enjoy each other’s company in their constantly repeating day. They goofed off, crashed other parties, did dangerous stunts, you name it.
I would too, if my life became the butt of the universe’s joke.

It was made clear that Nyles had been in the loop for magnitudes longer than Sarah – so long that he’d started forgetting some of his own life details – when asked where he worked before he got stuck, he couldn’t remember.

Clearly they figured out how to escape this personal hell, but the process was not the worn-out “do the same thing better” trope; I’ll let you go watch that solution for yourself.

This movie was technically a romantic comedy, and like all romantic comedies, the in-love couple hit a roadblock that resulted in them temporarily breaking up before their tearful reunion and inevitable escape to happily-ever-after. But, like the absolutely stellar “Last Christmas” (2019), the breakup was caused by an actual problem and not two peoples’ complete and inexplicable inability to communicate basic thoughts and feelings to each other.
And while ‘romantic comedy’ is the genre that IMDB lists for this movie, I would definitely say it was a dark comedy – there were many, many jokes about death or suicide or other gruesome concepts, discussed with joyful abandon, because Nyles and Sarah couldn’t actually die, so gallows humor became a necessity for their mental health.

J.K. Simmons was in this too, as the key part of the B-plot, which was both outstanding and a shame: I’m glad they included him, but I wish he had a bigger role.

Special effects were a non-event in this movie. The scenery was somewhere in the American southwest – presumably New Mexico or Arizona based on context clues – and the Palm Springs locale was clearly an actual place that they were filming in. Good camera-work though.

The soundtrack was fitting. It wasn’t the kind of music I’d want to listen to on my own, but it was good and it fit the vibe of the story throughout. I’m just not a fan of the calm pop-rock genre.

There’s a lot of cursing in this, but it was expected, because Nyles stopped having to be appropriate in any context and Sarah just found out her life would never progress beyond 9 November.

This movie earned a 4-Claw rating for taking an oft-repeated plot device and finding a way to refresh it, telling a familiar story with an unfamiliar twist.
This movie was as good any cross between “Groundhog Day” and “Last Christmas” could hope to be.
It was fun, and it was a great flick to watch while still under the oppressive regime of a pandemic.