From commuters reliving disaster to teens stuck in deja vu – the time-loop movie turns repetition into revelation. We round up the best of this oddly resilient subgenre
An Italian-Spanish remake of Groundhog Day, with a cynical nature presenter doomed to repeat the same 24 hours while reporting on a stork colony in the Canary Islands. The best thing about it is the Italian title: È già ieri (It’s Already Yesterday).
It’s Groundhog Day. Again. Except now the repeated days lose an hour with each revolution, introducing a crucial flicker of urgency. A Spanish holiday becomes agonisingly protracted for Alba (Iria del Rio), who uses the loop in which she finds herself stuck to maximise her life, starting with ditching the boyfriend who was about to dump her.
Inserted into the mind of a man who perished in a bomb blast on a train, Jake Gyllenhaal must relive repeatedly the eight minutes before the explosion until he discovers the bomber’s identity. Some nice in-jokes (Scott Bakula, star of the time-travel series Quantum Leap, has a voice cameo; a ringtone plays Chesney Hawkes’s The One and Only) can’t disguise the fact that suspense tends to suffer when the world can be endlessly rebooted.
One of the pitfalls of the time-loop movie as thriller rather than comedy is that exposition can easily overwhelm characterisation. That’s the case in Rian Johnson’s futuristic fantasy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as two iterations of the same “looper” – that is, a hitman paid to kill and dispose of enemies sent back in time by a crime syndicate. Over-fussy explanatory narration gets in the way, but it’s fun to hear Mob boss Jeff Daniels critiquing the hero’s retro wardrobe. “The movies you’re dressing like are just copying other movies,” he tells him. “Do something new.” Is he talking to the film-makers?
