by Eden
I don’t really understand who this movie is for. We’re supposed to be on Stillman’s side as he revisits the bad moments during his year-long relationship with Debbie and attempts to fix them. There’s a sinister undercurrent of manipulative selfishness in Stillman. He never seems to care about what Debbie wants, just what he wants — which is only to stop her from breaking up with him.
To get it out of the way, this is maybe marginal in terms of being an actual time-loop movie but I’ve decided to count it. Tim is in control of where and when he goes, and while he chooses to repeat a couple of things, he’s not going back to the same day over and over again.
It’s easy enough to say that time loop movies are very much about being stuck, about repeating patterns, but Palm Springs makes the case that Nyles and Sarah were already failing to move forward in their lives even before getting trapped in a time loop.
“I don’t know. I think maybe we’re supposed to become, like, better people,” Margaret tells Mark when he’s saying they should spend their time loop days trying to discover all the “tiny perfect things” in the title. Then she adds, as an aside, “Though I don’t know how that could even be possible.”
If you’ve seen a time loop movie before, you know Sam will end up being a better person at the end. If you’ve seen a YA movie before, you know Sam will end up rejecting her jerky boyfriend for her sweet, sensitive childhood friend, Kent. Not much here is a surprise, but the larger issues and Deutch’s appealing performance allow this to rise above the generic beats of the material.