Teresa Gets Scared Every Time / Universal Pictures

"You know, your story is a bit like Groundhog Day." - "What Groundhog Day?" - "Well, the movie with Bill Murray - haven't you seen it?"

This dialogue comes at the end of Happy Death Day, and it's one of the film's sweet moments: the writer and director having the audacity and mirth to openly say where they got the plot from. Other filmmakers who've been copying Harold Ramis's film for years have been hiding their eyes and pretending they came up with the structure themselves.

Here the structure is designed like this: student Teresa (Jessica Rothe) wakes up hungover in a dorm in the room of a guy she barely knows, who seemed to have picked her up yesterday. His neighbor knocks on the door and yells: "Well, did you get into her panties?" Having looked at the young men with disgust, the girl puts on her clothes and runs away to her campus building. She is met by her neighbor with a cake: today is Teresa's birthday. Closer to the night, she is killed by a maniac in a baby mask that looks like a pig. After being stabbed, the girl wakes up in the dorm in the room of a guy she barely knows, and all the events are repeated. In the evening, she will be killed again - though under slightly different circumstances. And then she will wake up again, die again, and wake up again, and die again, and again...

Notable Time Loop Movies

In the film Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray's cynical hero relived February 2nd over and over again; February 3rd arrived only after he had transformed himself, changing his outlook on life and himself. Over the past quarter century, the plot has been used in many films, here are a few.
"Mirror for a Hero" (1987). Vladimir Khotinenko's film is an unexpected predecessor of "Groundhog Day", shot six years before it (Hollywood probably hasn't heard of "Mirror for a Hero", but some ideas are really in the air). The characters of Sergei Koltakov and Ivan Bortnik suddenly find themselves in 1949 from the perestroika era and live the same day there, May 8, over and over again.
"Run Lola Run" (1998). A red-haired girl must urgently rescue her boyfriend from trouble. The first time it doesn't work, she dies. The second time too. But there's a third life in reserve.
"Edge of Tomorrow" (2014). The Earth is attacked by aliens, but Tom Cruise's hero gains the ability to be resurrected again and again.
"Time Matrix" (originally "Before I Fall", 2017) is the story of a high school girl who dies in a car accident in the evening, wakes up in the morning, dies again in the evening, etc. She needs to work on her behavior and become an exemplary girl - then the authors will finally let her die in peace.

In short, "Live. Die. Repeat," as the advertising slogan for Edge of Tomorrow, one of the few Groundhog Day clones that attempted to explain why the hero ended up in a time loop, went. In Death Day, everything happens simply: the heroine won't look for reasons for the miracle that happened, she'll accept it as a given. And she'll use it to a) find and neutralize the killer; b) understand herself, become a more responsible member of society, improve her relationship with her father, and stop being rude on the phone.

A theologian will say that all this is a vulgarized Catholic concept of purgatory: suffering purifies. A Buddhist or Hindu will add a few words about samsara. A psychologist will say about an infantile view of death, about the “physical impossibility of death in the mind of a living person” (especially when this living person, like the heroes and the target audience of the film, is 20 years old): you simply cannot be killed for good, death is pretend, you will wake up alive, with a headache at most. A sociologist will say about the influence of computer games on teenage minds, in which you are constantly dying and being reborn.

And the film critic, recalling other variations on the theme of "Groundhog Day", will simply begin to wish the heroine peace. To be honest, "Happy Death Day" is not a very scary, not very funny, not at all exciting film about an uninteresting young lady. And every time she gets poked with a knife, hope is born in you: maybe this time it will be like in the joke: "No, if she's dead, then she's dead."

The author is a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda

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In "Day in the Death", everything happens for no reason / Universal Pictures

In the horror film Happy Death Day, the heroine dies every day - but not completely