Review: Palm Springs (2020)
Directed by Max Marbakow; screenplay by Andy Siara; starring Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti and J. K. Simmons.
3.5/5
A romantic comedy co-starring Andy Samberg rehashing the now long exhausted time loop dilemma famously brought into the annuls of pop culture by a certain Bill Murray comedy from the nineties doesn’t exactly sound like the most fertile ground for a filmmaker, but – much as I probably wouldn’t blame you for it – you’d be missing out if you just wrote Palm Springs off and never gave it a shot. I have to say, Max Barbakow’s debut as a feature filmmaker is irreverent, surprisingly charming and particularly well thought through considering the huge risk for there was for it to fall into tedium attempting to retell such a well-worn tale.
Nyles (Andy Samberg), a carefree but maybe just entirely alienated young man, wakes up on the day of the wedding between Abe (Tyler Hoechlin) and Tala (Camila Mendes) – a close friend of his girlfriend Misty’s (Meredith Hanger). Nyles glides through the non-events leading up to the reception in the evening, avoiding Misty (their relationship is very clearly on the rocks, if not already dashed to pieces) and chatting with everyone else with a kind of well-rehearsed ease. It is here that Nyles meets Sarah (Cristin Milioti), Tala’s older sister whom no one seems to want around, introducing himself by abruptly interrupting the ceremony to deliver a speech in a valiant effort to save Sarah when she is unable to uphold her duties as maid-of-honour and give her own. It soon becomes apparent, though, that the reason Nyles has been skipping so effortlessly through the day is because this isn’t the first time he’s lived it. When things at the ceremony start to die down, and after Nyles reveals to Sarah that he knows Misty is cheating on him, the pair hook up and travel out into the nearby Californian desert for some privacy. Suddenly, Nyles is shot with an arrow and flees to a nearby cave, within which a kind of portal transports himself, his attacker and now Sarah back in time to the beginning of the day. Sarah, along with Nyles and whoever “Roy” is (spoiler: it’s J. K. Simmons), is now doomed to relive the same day over and over to exhaustion.
What makes Palm Springs’ retelling of what is a very common premise (we’ve got your Edge of Tomorrows, we’ve got your Happy Death Days, your Run Lola Runs, your Source Codes, to name a few) such a compelling watch is that it acts as though it’s a kind of sequel to another film that must have happened beforehand. Nyles is by now well-versed in the mechanics of the plot and concisely explains them to Sarah after she, almost instantly, realises what has happened to her. Anecdotes punctuate Nyles’ account of the most obvious beats that have already occurred for him and this really allows Barbakow the space to quickly move on from the less interesting places a story like this could and probably would go if it were in less capable hands. The rules, as Nyles lays out, are simple: you fall asleep and you wake up at the start of the day, you die and the same thing happens. Anyone who goes through the portal in the cave – that seems to open up only after a small tremor rumbles through the region each day – becomes aware of their situation and can recall previous iterations.
Nyles has explored most of what this concept has to offer him personally and is now just sick of it all. He wants to coast through his cursed existence with as little resistance as possible. What Nyles already knows but Sarah is soon to discover, a world in which external consequences are moot, for good and bad actions alike, can quickly be reduced to crushing meaninglessness. Nobody will recall having just minutes ago fallen in love with you just as nobody will remember you having stabbed them in the cheek with a fork at their reception.
But Barbakow strives to ask if there is anything more to all this. Does every answer to this fairly obvious metaphor for the meaninglessness of (particularly locked-down) daily life always end with block-grey gloominess? When the question arises over finally leaving the loop, Palm Springs isn’t interested so much in the mechanics of how, but why – something I’m not sure I’ve seen considered seriously before in a film like this. Nyles’ numbing routine built entirely on convenience is fundamentally shattered when Sarah is thrown into the mix and his inability to construct any kind of meaningful relationship disappears. Sarah, to him, is a variable to the constancy of the loop. But his pain is only alleviated until the moment he realises that she just doesn’t want what he wants, she doesn’t want to stay put. And way out Sarah ultimately concocts comes attached to a great risk that, to her, is entirely worth it. For Sarah, by virtue of the unique pain brought on by her own relationship to the day that is being relived over and over, even the potential for death is preferrable to remaining trapped. So, the pair of them are faced with the question of why? Why risk everything? And what is there to go back out there to with everything they’ve experienced in the rear-view?
It isn’t the most profound statement on the meaning of life but it is genuinely moving. Add to this rather well-constructed Aburdist conundrum of a film a killer soundtrack featuring an indisputably glorious use of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting and you’re almost golden. Aside from its shying away from allowing its climactic cut to black (you’ll know the one if you’ve seen it) to be the final word in the matter and what I found to be a slightly worn-out visual style, I think Palm Springs is a true diamond in the rough this year that I honestly did not see coming. There is so much to love here and the fact that the film’s slightly dude-bro-y, Rom-Com trappings may well keep it from being taken quite as seriously as it should be in the grand scheme of things is quite the tragedy.
Watched on 10th May 2021