90 min | R | July 10, 2020 | Neon
A wedding guest wakes up on the same November day over and over. Then a stranger gets stuck in the loop with him. Eternity is more bearable when someone else is trapped in it too.
Nyles attends a wedding in the desert and lives the same day on repeat. He has done it long enough to stop trying to escape. He drifts through the ceremony in a Hawaiian shirt, drunk and detached, because consequences no longer exist for him. Then Sarah, the bride’s sister, follows him into a glowing cave and gets pulled into the loop herself. Max Barbakow and Andy Siara build a comedy about infinity and use it to ask what a person does when nothing they do can matter.
Andy Samberg plays Nyles as a man who has already grieved his own situation and come out the other side numb. He delivers his jokes with the flatness of someone who has heard every possible response a thousand times. Cristin Milioti plays Sarah with anger and self-loathing that the loop only sharpens. She refuses to accept the surrender that Nyles has made his peace with, and Milioti grounds every scene she shares with him. J.K. Simmons plays Roy, another resident of the loop, with a menace that curdles into something sadder the more we learn about him.
Barbakow directs his first feature and Siara writes a script that treats its science-fiction premise as settled fact rather than mystery. The film never stops to explain the physics and the discipline pays off. Quinn the cinematographer shoots the Palm Springs desert in flat midday light that makes one day blur into the next without a cut. The editing reuses the same morning beats with small variations so the audience learns the rhythm the way the characters have. The structure trusts repetition to do the emotional work and it does.
This is a film about two people deciding whether a life with no future is worth living together. Nyles has chosen comfort inside the trap. Sarah refuses to stop looking for the exit. The movie locates real feeling underneath the gimmick because it understands that the loop is a metaphor for any relationship where both people know exactly how the day will go. Barbakow has the sense to play the existential dread for laughs and the laughs for dread.