20. Stork Day (2004)
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).
19. The Incredible Shrinking Wknd (2019)
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.
18. Source Code (2011)
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.
17. Looper (2012)
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?
16. Before I Fall (2017)
A high-school student joins in with viciously humiliating the class misfit at a Valentine’s Day party. Once her life resets after a car accident, though, she endures endless identical versions of that day – including a class on Sisyphus (who is also referenced in other time-loop movies including Triangle and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things). There are the usual dawning frustrations typical of the time-loop format – “Grounded? I’m already grounded!” she rages, when faced with the go-to parental punishment – before she learns not to be a despicable bully after all. Aww.
15. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021)
Happy-go-lucky teen Kyle Allen is already stuck in the same day when a young woman (Kathryn Newton) crosses his path for the first time. Turns out she shares his predicament, but has poignant reasons for never wanting it to end. Together they embark on a project to map out all the overlooked moments of beauty in their small town. High on cuteness, this YA-inflected comedy-drama piles on references to Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Doctor Who and Time Bandits (which also centres on a map), but never quite establishes its own identity.
14. Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)
The time loop forms only a minor initial part of this anime sequel, which departs inventively from the original manga on which it is based. It earns a place here nevertheless for unbridled imaginative delirium. A group of school friends, having twigged that their days are repeating, zoom off into space and discover that their city is being borne on the shell of a colossal turtle. Standard.
13. Happy Death Day (2017)
In a nifty touch, the opening Universal logo glitches and restarts. We then follow a college party girl (Jessica Rothe) repeatedly reliving her birthday, which ends each time with her murder; methods include stabbing, bludgeoning, drowning and death by broken bong. Now it’s up to her to catch her own killer. Groundhog slay, in other words; that comedy gets a mention when Tree’s new beau, a Bill Murray nut, expresses dismay that she hasn’t seen it. The 2019 sequel (Happy Death Day 2U) was a repetition too far.
12. Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week! (2022)
Splat! An unfortunate pigeon collides with the window of a high-rise Tokyo advertising agency – but when it keeps happening, the employees realise they’re stuck in a time loop. Exempt from this knowledge is their boss, whom they must convince (their PowerPoint presentation to him is a highlight) before the loop can be broken. Ryō Takebayashi’s workplace comedy sneaks a few jibes at corporate culture into its madcap format, and hinges on a poetic touch: the secret to escaping the loop turns out to lie within a beautiful unfinished manga.
11. Palm Springs (2020)
Like The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, this adopts Groundhog Day writer Danny Rubin’s original, rejected idea of beginning the story with the time loop already under way. Andy Samberg is the carefree wedding guest stalked by crossbow-wielding JK Simmons, who is now sore for all eternity after being dragged into the loop with him. Amid the gory comic violence, there is a serious point: “What we do to other people matters … We have to deal with the things we do.” Dropping during the first Covid lockdown only made the film more relatable.
10. La Jetée (1962)
“The human race was doomed. Space was off limits. The only hope was time.” Chris Marker’s half-hour short comprises a series of still photographs and a single briefly moving image, as a dispassionate narrator explains how a post-apocalyptic time traveller is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man die at Orly airport. Spoiler alert: it was his own death he witnessed all along. Remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys.
9. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Groundhog melee: the time loop hits the battlefield, with backroom boy Tom Cruise forced to become cannon fodder in a war against marauding alien beasties. He soon kicks the bucket, only to wake up again in the first of an endless series of loops, armed each time with fractionally greater knowledge of the enemy. It descends into homogeneous thrashing combat for the last half hour. Until then, it’s quite a ride, with Cruise happy to be repeatedly annihilated and to play second fiddle to co-star Emily Blunt in the action-hero stakes.
8. 12:01PM (1990)
Adapted from Richard A Lupoff’s short story, this Oscar-nominated short begins with a businessman (Kurtwood Smith) already reliving his lunch-break for the umpteenth time before the hour resets yet again. During several of these endless lunchtimes, he manages to reach a scientist who has made predictions about time loops. The prevalent note, though, is futility: the short ends, boldly and bleakly, with the marooned hero trapped for ever. Later expanded into the crummy 1993 TV movie 12:01.
7. The Terminator (1984)
A revolutionary leader fighting a future war against malign AI and its robot minions sends his father back in time to save his mother from a remorseless killing machine so that she can, in turn, get pregnant and give birth to him. That baby will then grow up to be a revolutionary leader fighting a future war against malign AI and its robot minions, and can send his father back to … woahhh.
6. Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Jacques Rivette’s freewheeling Parisian fantasy is loopy in both senses. A pair of loose-goosey chums – one a magician (Juliet Berto), the other a librarian (Dominique Labourier) – run amok in Montmartre. They return repeatedly to a mansion where a sinister Jamesian melodrama revolving around the murder of a child is being re-enacted on a loop. By sucking on a magic sweet, the pals can first observe and then participate in the intrigue, taking the role of the child’s nurse and intervening to avert catastrophe: “We must save the kid at all costs!”
5. Triangle (2009)
Harassed single mother Melissa George takes a yachting trip with friends, only for a freak storm to hit, forcing them all to clamber on board a passing cruise liner where a serial killer appears to be the sole passenger. That’s the good news. The bad? Events are stuck in an endlessly repeating pattern that turns this into the world’s first maritime-loop movie. Unforgettable images depict the detritus from previous revolutions of the loop: piles of identical discarded sweetheart lockets, handwritten warnings from the past à la Memento, and, shockingly, multiples of the same corpse being pecked at by nonchalant seagulls.
4. Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968)
A shipping clerk who survives a suicide attempt agrees to take a trip through time: scientists will send him exactly one year into the past, courtesy of a time machine that resembles a giant pumpkin, and then bring him back after just one minute. The retrieval mission doesn’t go according to plan, however, and the woebegone soul bounces between fragments – some repeated, and none in chronological order – of the failed relationship that drove him to despair. Director Alain Resnais had already engaged in temporal jiggery-pokery with Last Year at Marienbad but this is a more accessible and tender work, as well as a defining influence on Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.
3. Groundhog Day for a Black Man (2016)
Director Cynthia Kao feeds four minutes of grimly comic social commentary into the Groundhog Day format. Like Bill Murray in that film, the protagonist here (played by Burl Moseley) is woken each morning by Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe. But, being Black, he finds each day truncated in the same fashion: no matter how placatory and unthreatening he is, he ends up shot dead by a white cop. The horror is expertly leavened with prop gags (a lobster costume, a lemon meringue pie) and the payoff is suitably sobering. The curiously similar 2020 Netflix short Two Distant Strangers went on to win an Oscar, and to attract accusations of plagiarism.
2. The Clock (2010)
A video installation on the theme of time, Christian Marclay’s clockwork masterwork is a rolling 24-hour collage of film clips in a literal loop, with no beginning and no end. Tied to whichever time zone it is being shown, The Clock also doubles as an actual timepiece: when the town hall clock on screen in Back to the Future shows 10:04pm, that’s the time in real life; and when Heather Langenkamp in A Nightmare on Elm Street sings “nine, 10, never sleep again”, there is no need to check your watch: it really is 9:10pm. The integrity is weakened by snatches of television clips (including ER and the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras) but for the most part this is a hypnotic work of genius. Make sure you’re there at 6am for the megamix of fragments from Groundhog Day, What About Bob?, Good Morning Vietnam and Fright Night.
1. Groundhog Day (1993)
“That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s… Groundhog Day!” Wander through the history of the time-loop movie and you always end up looping back to Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin’s miraculous fusion of formalist experiment and mainstream high-jinks. Bill Murray is at his unsavoury best as the misanthropic weatherman who can’t wait for his jaunt to the Groundhog Day festivities in folksy Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to be over. He may be done with 2 February, however, but 2 February isn’t done with him. Precisely how long he is stuck in that day is never specified. “For me, it had to be … A hundred years,” said Rubin. “A lifetime.” But the script’s total absence of explanations is one of its most radical qualities. Hats off to the film-makers for resisting pressure to blame the time loop on a spurned lover’s curse or a black hole.
Adored by everyone from David O Russell and Monty Python polymath Terry Jones to Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, Bridget Jones director Sharon Maguire and even Mad Max creator George Miller, Groundhog Day has spawned a stage musical, a VR game, an Italian remake and innumerable imitations. (The best is Natasha Lyonne’s ingenious series Russian Doll.) For all that, it has never been equalled – or, thank goodness, sequelled.
• The new edition of Groundhog Day: BFI Film Classics by Ryan Gilbey is published by Bloomsbury
