Not a day goes by when I don’t think about “Groundhog Day,” a film in which the same damn day goes by, over and over. I had a premonition, when Harold Ramis’s movie was released, in 1993, that it might hang around in our bloodstream, and so it has. What matters about the story’s main conceit—of a fellow named Phil (Bill Murray), enchained in a time loop—is not its novelty, or the crystalline logic with which it is worked through, but the fact that it answers to something permanent in our way of being. (The very best comedies, now and then, can do this with an ease that makes tragedians go nuts.) “Groundhog Day,” people say, when asked about their job, or the third year of their marriage, or the prospect of infinity in a meaningless void, or the choice of salads at the lunch counter. We can fight the loop; we can cave in to it; we can take the karmic path, pour another beer, and go with the flow. Makes no difference. At bottom, all of us are Phil.
“Groundhog Day,” though impeccable, is not inimitable, and copycats have been on the prowl. There is a tasty irony in settling down to a new movie and, after half an hour, frowning in the dark and saying to yourself, “Hang on, haven’t I been here before?” No one has been dumb enough to risk a reboot of Ramis’s film—wisely so, since the mere attempt would rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Instead, the axioms of groundhoggery have been applied to various genres. Hence “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), a war movie in which Tom Cruise keeps getting killed in combat and then waking up the next morning, in flawless fettle. “Happy Death Day” (2017) ropes the slasher movie into the loop, for the benefit of those cognoscenti who like their slashings on repeat. The smartest riff is that of “Source Code” (2011), in which eight action-packed minutes, rather than twenty-four tiring hours, are frequently rerun, in a bid to foil a crime.
Now we have the boringly titled but keenly spirited “Palm Springs.” The director is Max Barbakow, the screenwriter is Andy Siara, and the chronologically challenged hero is Nyles (Andy Samberg), who, at the outset of the tale, is already stuck. Whatever he does, however he dies, whoever he sleeps with, and regardless of his good deeds or his gross misconduct, he is doomed to open his eyes, afresh, to a nice identical day in a Palm Springs hotel. And guess what? It’s a wedding day. Nyles isn’t the one getting hitched, thank heaven. He’s only there because his girlfriend, the dim and faithless Misty (Meredith Hagner), is a bridesmaid. But still, what a dazzling vision of the purgatorial: a desert of vast eternity, strewn with so-so canapés, stumblebum speeches, and worse dancing. Sisyphus had it easy.
Nyles has one companion in his plight, a fellow-guest named Roy (J. K. Simmons), who is none too pleased about this accursed state, and who vents his spleen by shooting Nyles with a bow and arrows—to no lasting effect, of course. Soon, another guest, Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the sister of the bride, is unwittingly sucked into the fray. (Barbakow makes the mistake of trying to unearth the roots of the loop, offering some woo-woo baloney in a mystical cave. Ramis’s craftiest coup was to leave things unexplained.) Nyles is there to verse her in the laws of perpetual recurrence. “Your best bet is just to learn how to suffer existence,” he tells her, mutating briefly into Schopenhauer, but the merrier option, as he and Sarah proceed to demonstrate, is consequence-free excess: drinking, driving way too fast, stealing an airplane, and romping around a dive bar in matching denim jackets and red neckerchiefs.
So, do all these shenanigans mark an advance on Phil? Not really; he, too, veered between the nihilistic and the cavalier, and most of “Palm Springs,” I’d say, was prefigured in the sight of Bill Murray slowly jamming a slice of cake into his maw, looking at a disgusted Andie MacDowell, and then mouthing, “What?” (or, to be precise, “Whahh?”) through a clot of creamy frosting. Also, his ever-crumpled features told of the taedium vitae that goes with the loop, whereas Andy Samberg—immensely cheerful company onscreen, as fans of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” will attest—prefers his groundhog neat and quick, without a chaser of hangdog.
What does make this movie stand out is the presence of Cristin Milioti, a paragon of goofiness and grace. Though wide-eyed, she is far too knowing to be an ingénue. You may recall her in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), yelling at Leonardo DiCaprio as he spills out of a limousine in front of Trump Tower, and the yells persist, in the early scenes of “Palm Springs,” with Sarah exclaiming, “What the fuck?,” for want of anything wittier. She even screams underwater, in a pool. But gradually, under Milioti’s care, the character blooms, not just in resourceful roguery but in pathos; the happy haze of tears that descends upon her in the dive bar is as sudden and as heart-seizing as the closeup of Ginger Rogers, in “Shall We Dance” (1937), half crying when Fred Astaire says goodbye with a song. Falling in love is grand, but imagine falling time and time again. Nyles is a lucky guy.
If there were a campaign for the promotion of matrilineal movies—and there ought to be—then “Relic” would be in the vanguard. This forbidding Australian film, directed by Natalie Erika James, tells of three women, each of a different generation. The oldest is Edna (Robyn Nevin), who is in her eighties, and who lives alone, a fair way from Melbourne, in a secluded house. When she goes missing, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and Kay’s daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) come looking for her. They move in, consult the police, comb the dripping forest nearby, and wait for Edna to return. Which she does, without warning; Kay finds her in the kitchen, wearing a robe and with dirty feet, and greets her with bewilderment and relief. Edna looks up. “Tea?” she asks. “One sugar, right?”
It’s a fine moment, all the more troubling for Edna’s casual tone. “I suppose I went out,” she says, as if that settles the issue. The question of where she went—whether outward, into the woods, like a witch on the lam, or inward, into the secret recesses of her dwelling—remains unresolved. And you can’t help wondering how she got that smarting bruise, as dark as a damson, on her sternum: the first of many insults to the flesh, be warned, that are shown in the course of the film.
In some respects, “Relic” is a haunted-house flick of the old school. Stains migrate across walls; a window of colored glass, set in the front door, is clouded by black mold; things truly do go bump in the night. Even a humble tumble dryer gets to join in, thumping away of its own accord—a godsend, surely, when you have a bunch of laundry to get through, but I guess it adds to the spooking. On the rare occasions when lamps are switched on, they cast but a feeble glow, and I had to smother a guilty laugh when Kay was ordered, in all seriousness, to look under the bed. Yikes! That sort of thing has been a joke for almost a century; in the silent version of “The Cat and the Canary”(1927), an anxious guest, in a creaky mansion, kneels down to take a similar peek. There, she finds nothing worse than a simpering chump, though it’s true that his spectacles gleam, for an instant, with diabolical fire.
“Relic” is designed less to freak you out than to worry away at you. More daunting than any evil spectre, visiting from the dead, is the movie’s fear—common to countless families—that living souls will become the ghosts of themselves, and that a person’s memory, be it fond or distressing, may start to rot like a corpse. The dreaded word “dementia” is never mentioned, but you can see it and hear it in Edna’s actions and inactions; she springs at her loved ones in a rage, scrabbles at the soil in order to bury a photograph album, and stands erect and bare, like a statue, as the bath overruns. So long is her ash-gray hair that, when unpinned, it falls halfway down her back and curtains her; we can’t even tell, at one point, which way she is facing.
It’s a hell of a performance by Robyn Nevin, who’s had a long and commanding career on the Australian stage. She was the artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company; her production of “Hedda Gabler,” starring Cate Blanchett, travelled to BAM in 2006. I actually wanted more of Nevin in “Relic,” because she summons the creative nerve, amid the clamminess and the gloom, to venture a light touch. “House arrest it is, then,” Edna says, when she’s told to stick around where Kay and Sam can keep an eye on her. But what if she sticks too close? Can you peel her off? There are remarkable scenes, late on, in which the house appears to home in upon the women; the rooms grow ever smaller and more boxy, the better to reinforce the terrifying idea of old age as a kind of crawl space. By the end, I didn’t care how much of “Relic” was unfurling in the characters’ heads, and how much was taking place on the premises. I just wanted room to breathe. ♦
