Palm Springs

This charming and scabrously funny romantic comedy has a time-loop plot that puts it in the same galaxy as Groundhog Day. It remains to be seen whether “Yeah he’s in Palm Springs…” will become synonymous with a boy meets girl scenario that goes in an endlessly repeating day. Nyles (Andy Samberg) wakes up on the day of a wedding. At this wedding he protects a drunk bridesmaid Sarah (Cristin Miloti) from having to make an impromptu speech, but shortly thereafter he flees the scene, having been shot with a crossbow by Roy (JK Simmons). Sarah follows him and ends up in a strange cave, wherein she becomes part of the repeating cycle of that single day.

This is only somewhat like that other time loop movie though. There’s an immediate desire for Sarah to escape even though she likes Nyles, and he is kind of resigned to it—he has made quite a lot of having the same day again and again with no consequences. So we have an entertaining protagonist and a funny and pretty counterpart with Agency and Sass by the bucket-load.

And somehow since the two of course have the memory of the previous days, they go through a storyline of their own which doesn’t reset. I loved the chemistry of the two actors: the romcom trope is so obvious that it’s a good movie that makes you forget the tropes, and this does. This is partly because of the wedding party subplot and of course JK Simmons, who is always brilliant.

No spoilers, but this film is like an instant classic—the kind of classic that has Kate Bush on the soundtrack. It is absolutely brilliant: charming, funny and fun. Andy Samberg (of Brooklyn Nine-Nine) is perfectly cast. Cristin Miloti was the eponymous mother in How I Met Your Mother, and if you watched that you will know that she was perfectly wonderful and hardly in it. Well she is brilliant, perfectly acting like the kind of person who wouldn’t expect to be in a time loop and realistically adapting to it.

Brilliant, wonderful, hilarious.