With the release of slasher sequel Happy Death Day 2U following on the heels of popular new Netflix comedy Russian Doll, viewers may find themselves experiencing a palpable sense of deja vu, not unlike those properties’ respective protagonists.
Russian Doll follows the surreal odyssey of Nadia Vulvokov (series co-creator Natasha Lyonne), a hard-living New York video game designer stuck reliving the last night of her life (which also happens to coincide with her 36th birthday), while Happy Death Day 2U finds long-suffering sorority girl Tree Gelbman flung into an alternate universe and forced to re-experience her own birth/death day for the second time (unlike Nadia, who falls victim to a random series of mortal mishaps, Tree is continuously stalked and murdered by a masked killer known as Babyface).
Russian Doll and Happy Death Day 2U are but the latest in a long line of big and small screen properties that use the repeating day structure popularized by 1993’s Groundhog Day. While narratives featuring closed time loops can be traced to a few earlier examples – most notably short science fiction stories Double and Redoubled from Malcolm Jameson in 1941 and 12:01 PM from Richard A Lupoff in 1973, as well as 1984 Japanese anime film Urusei Yarsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer – it was the Harold Ramis-Bill Murray comedy that cemented this trope within the public consciousness and begat an entire subgenre. Interestingly, the writers and producers of the second adaptation of 12:01, which premiered on the Fox Network the same year as Groundhog Day, threatened to sue Columbia Pictures, though they never went through with it.
Repetitive as these films can be (by design), their shred conceit lends itself to just about every genre and tone: slapstick comedy (the 2000 Swedish film Naken and its 2017 American remake Naked), cat-and-mouse thriller (Source Code), sci-fi blockbuster (Edge of Tomorrow), teen melodrama (Before I Fall). Like other subgenres that usually stick to a tight framework – the heist film, the underdog sports movie, the slasher flick – familiarity is a major part of their appeal, one that gives audiences what they want while also affording storytellers the chance to put their personal spin on the proceedings. It’s about the singer, not the song, as the saying goes.
But these stories also speak to more subterranean concerns. Like a number of films and television series that traffic in the temporal by way of fable and allegory – A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, various episodes of the Twilight Zone – they attempt to make sense of man’s relationship to the dueling forces of fate and chance. Whereas those other examples held a fatalistic view that stressed the impossibility of changing the past, time loop movies in the Groundhog Day mold take the opposite tack.
Like Phil Connors, the egotistical TV weatherman at the center of Groundhog Day, most of the protagonists found in time loop films start out as selfish jerks – Before I Fall and Happy Death Day’s leads are members of their respective schools’ mean girl cliques, Edge of Tomorrow’s hero is an abject coward, Russian Doll’s Nadia is a solipsistic addict with little concern for how her actions affect others. Through repetition, they are able to adopt an objective view of their toxic influence and make the necessary adjustments that will win them their freedom from their existential prisons (which are sometime based in pseudoscientific explanation – quantum physics, multiverse theory, the butterfly effect – but which are just as often left mysterious).
That the answer to their conundrum usually boils down to such obvious methods of self-improvement and inspirational cant – live for the moment, put others before yourself, embrace your mortality – makes them something of a bastardized version of Sisyphus, a Sisyphus for the modern era, where the thought of eternal toil just doesn’t jibe with our ingrained sense of individualism and self-worth.
Viewed through this lens, the contradiction at the heart of these narratives grows even more clear: despite the parallels to Eastern spirituality that many are quick to point out, they each depict their individual heroes – gifted as they are with multiple, even infinite, chances to alter the past until it results in an outcome suited to their liking – as the literal center of their respective universe. (To its credit, Happy Death Day 2U openly acknowledges this idea.)
Still, despite their inherent thematic hypocrisy, these films and series often manage to succeed on their own terms. Russian Doll’s use of the device makes for truly thorough and riveting character study, while giving it the chance to juggle a number of disparate tones – humor, pathos, startling jolts of Kubrickian dread (all while serving as a long-overdue showcase for Lyonne). Happy Death Day 2U, though not wholly successful (there’s a couple of subplots too many, and at times the comedy goes a bit too broad), is a thoroughly entertaining, admirably expansive companion piece to the original, replete with plenty of great moments (most notably a gangbusters montage that serves as the centerpiece of the entire franchise so far).
The Groundhog Day formula isn’t going away anytime soon: future seasons of Russian Doll and future sequels to Happy Death Day (as well as Edge of Tomorrow) are already on the horizon while a VR follow-up to the 1993 comedy is also on the way. Hopefully, these will push the genre into new territory and open it up to deeper exploration, but even if that doesn’t end up happening, is it not entirely fitting that these stories should find themselves reappearing and repeating, over and over and over and over and …
