Today is March 371st 2020, and day 355 of my personal lockdown. I’m watching time-loop movies today, and my second is Happy Death Day. Spoilers follow. This was a fun slasher movie that uses the Groundhog Day structure to avoid the Final Girl cliche.
Statistics
- Length of first iteration: 13 minutes
- Length of second iteration: 15.5 minutes
- Reset point: death
- Fidelity of loop: Some internal trauma is carried over to future iterations
- Exit from the loop: survival
This film was obviously not trying to be Groundhog Day (which it made a nod to at the end), but it was slick. It started well, with the Universal ident at the start looping. The script was funny, with awful characters saying awful things (Tree confesses to spitting on an Uber driver). The mystery element worked pretty well too.
It didn’t do anything novel with the time loop idea, although I liked that the main character, Tree, found an ally. There wasn’t enough of the growth through the iterations, and she didn’t take advantage of the situation – understandable, given that she was facing a murderer. Good slasher film though.