Palm Springs

"It's going to be a beautiful wedding."

Over the past decade, we have seen the complete upheaval of Hollywood as we know it, with the sudden rise of streaming platforms (like Netflix & Amazon Prime) and on-demand access to films, resulting in the world's overall movie revenue having less than 50% of it’s numbers actually being made in cinemas themselves. It was almost as if this seismic shift for the entertainment business was in preparation for a few years down the line, almost as if they knew we were about to be hit with a global pandemic that would make cinema visits entirely impossible for 5 months out of the year. Fortunately, film studios learned quite suddenly that the way to keep the art of cinema alive in this period of people staying at home, bored out of their minds, was to send these ready-for-release films directly into people’s homes for on-demand viewing.

One of these lockdown releases is Hulu original Palm Springs (2020), which sees Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti as two wedding guests who get stuck in a time loop and live the same day over and over again whilst forming a budding romance. 

The film, which quite aptly mirrors this current period of time (anyone else felt like the last 5 months has been a constant cycle of living the same day over and over!?), is funny. But not too funny. It’s subtly very witty throughout, but not too packed with laughs that it distracts from the story itself. Infact, the whole film sort of tries to avoid falling into any one kind of category. It's a complete collision of genres, as you might expect from creators The Lonely Island (Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping). Palm Springs plays with every genre, from rom-com to drama, and even to sci-fi. It explores  all possible directions that it could have gone in as a film, and as a result of that, nothing is left unanswered. It is a total mash-up of genres that creates something entirely of its own.

What works so well for Palm Springs, and that you don’t see in as many other Groundhog Day-esque films, is that everything is well thought-out, and nothing is left unexplained or open-ended. Everything has an answer if you think about it hard enough, as it really looks into the practical and realistic side of situations as well. This resulted in the film as a whole having a satisfyingly complex plot that avoids feeling repetitive as the day(s) in the film rolled on. 

Combining these elements with the fact that this film spent so much time exploring the more profound side of scenarios (human emotion, right and wrong, karma, etc.) it meant that Palm Springs always felt like it was giving a little bit more, always maintained its ideas and its direction, and never felt lost.

★★★★