By Aaron Schweitzer
What’s your favorite movie of 2020 so far? Allow me to tell you a little bit about mine.
I guess you followed me. It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about?
Let’s take a list of all the great time-loop movies: Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day 2U, Source Code, is that it? Well it was, but now we have to add one more to the list because now we have Palm Springs! While attending a destination wedding in Palm Springs, Nyles and Sarah get caught in a time loop and work together to make the best of it. Streaming on Hulu exclusively, written by Andy Siara, directed by Max Barbakow, and staring Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, and J.K. Simmons, Palm Springs winds up being a really clever dramedy and one of my favorite recent movie experiences.
Before we go any further, I’m going to spoil this movie, so if you’ve already seen it or don’t care, read on. If spoilers are a trigger for you, here it is Spoiler Warning. Scroll to the bottom to see my grade, then come back to read the rest after you’ve seen it.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to start by saying the one thing that I didn’t love about this movie: as with every movie, there is inevitably some conflict our main characters experience right before the resolution and to me, it lasted just a bit too long. Okay, done with negative talk here, so here I go gushing!
When I saw the trailer for this movie, I had many thoughts, (which you can hear on Ep 6 of Siftpop Writers Room) and while most of the thoughts were incredibly positive, I did have one negative which was, “how is this movie going to be its own thing and be original with this concept?” And boy-oh-boy am I glad to have that alleviated. Part of the reason why I love this movie is because of its creativity with this scenario. For starters, Nyles has been in the loop for several hundred (or more) days, Roy has also but doesn’t appear every day, and we get to experience the story starting with Sarah. I love this for three reasons: one is that for the first time ever, we see how a day like this in its thousandth run goes on from an outsider’s perspective, one is that this allows Sarah to be our surrogate for figuring out how this world works (similar to Elliot Page in Inception), and finally because it gives us two different perspectives to deal with, Sarah being optimistic and Nyles being pessimistic.
There are so many other clever things this movie does, such as Sarah waking up every morning on the worst day of her life filled with shame and regret, which is revealed about halfway through the movie. Nyles’ girlfriend is cheating on him which leads to the funniest moments. Roy is angry at Nyles for bringing him in the loop with him. And best of all, this movie actually goes to some lengths to try to explain why this is happening (something Groundhog Day and the first Happy Death Day were never interested in exploring) but doesn’t overly complicate things or spend too much time dwelling on it.
The last thing I want to talk about is this movie themes and messages. When I finished watching it, I thought this movie was a 9/10, but because of the themes and messages, it elevates it to a 10/10 for me. Nyles has been living in a world without consequence and you see how that affects him, especially when they find an out. Sarah is living with shame and regret that will carry over to the next day, but would rather face that than keep living the same day’s regret for infinity. Roy lashes out in anger, but also learns to love the little things in his life with his family in a truly wholesome scene. This is a movie that I want to continue to think about for the next few weeks and keep picking apart because this movie is incredibly re-watchable and I already can’t wait for my next viewing.
Grade: A+