November 9th in Palm Springs: a beautiful day for a wedding. Everyone is enjoying themselves except for Sarah, older sister of the bride and maid-of-honour. But after fellow guest Nyles bails her out of a speech she’s unprepared for, things start looking up. Until their hook-up in the surrounding desert is interrupted when Nyles is shot in the shoulder with an arrow by a mysterious man. Understandably freaked out and concerned, Sarah follows Nyles into a strange, glowing cave, despite his warnings not to follow. And then she wakes up… on the morning of November 9th. Sarah’s now stuck along with Nyles in an infinite time-loop where they have no choice but to live. But this begs the question, what is the point of living when anything you do is ultimately pointless?
Palm Springs featuring a Groundhog Day time-loop isn’t a spoiler as it was a prominent feature of its trailer and marketing, and like all good time-loop films—like Groundhog Day and Happy Death Day—the point is not the loop itself but the epiphanies and growth it engenders in the characters. It’s also a versatile plot device, able to operate within genres as diverse as science fiction, romance, and horror. Palm Springs uses it as a comedic device.
It began as an idea that director Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara had when they were film students: “an absurdist comedic mumblecore take on Leaving Las Vegas, centered on a despondent thirtysomething who travels to Palm Springs to kill himself, only to slowly rediscover a sense of meaning in his life.” They then redeveloped the idea, giving it a more ambitious sci-fi angle and distancing it from Groundhog Day—the acknowledged starting point for the use of a time-loop in a romantic comedy—by having Nyles already in the loop from the start and adding Sarah as a second character to act as the audience point of view. This leads to an opening that’s a little awkward upon first viewing, but once the time-loop shenanigans start, the pacing and plotting take off, going through each stage of their journey through the loop—that are rather like the five stages of grief: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance— spending just the right amount of time on each. The “rules” of the loop are also kept simple—it restarts once you fall asleep or you die, and only those trapped in it remember the events of previous loops—allowing the story to maintain internal consistency, thereby avoiding the pitfall of making it audience-alienatingly complicated.
Of course, a good story still needs good actors to tell it. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti play the central pair and the chemistry between them is superb. Milioti’s energy is a good compliment to Samberg’s—Nyles initially being the one who’s more laid back and reactive, Sarah being the more aggressive and proactive – and both are both likably flawed. J. K. Simmons has a small but significant part as Roy—a wedding guest who Nyles inadvertently brought into the loop previously and who now turns up every once and while to hunt Nyles down—and the rest of the cast (including the Arrowverse’s Tyler Hoechlin and Riverdale’s Camila Mendes) are equally good, no matter how minor the role.
The comedy is a combination of cringe and slapstick—there are some great montage sequences (which the film understandably makes judicious use of) which include a hilarious dance sequence, increasingly ridiculous stunts and Roy’s methods of torturing Nyles—but still has the usual rom-com beats. It also has a slight cynical edge to it, giving the story a little more bite but without undercutting any of the genuinely emotional moments (and preventing it from descending into pretentious navel-gazing).
Mention must also be made of its cracking soundtrack, that includes tracks from Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie and Kate Bush.
If you’re expecting the sci-fi elements to evolve beyond their basic premise you’re going to be disappointed (the time-loop itself, for instance, is never truly explained). But then, as we’ve established, this isn’t a sci-fi film—it’s unapologetically a rom-com. And once you get past the slow start, you’ll find a really good one, as its streaming numbers and two Golden Globe nominations seem to attest.
