If You Haven’t Watched Palm Springs on Hulu Yet, Hollywood’s Obsession With Time Loops Gave Us This Gem Right When We Got Caught In Our Own

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“Today, tomorrow, yesterday…it’s all the same.”
-Andy Samberg, Palm Springs…and also me, anytime anyone asks me how things are going these days

The last few years have given us a lot of what I’m going to refer to collectively as “timeloop content.” Marlon Wayans’ Naked. Adam Devine’s When We First Met. Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll. Horror franchise Happy Death Day. And my personal favorite, the season 1 finale of IFC’s Sherman’s Showcase. As each new entry to the genre was released, I wondered about it with more regularity. Why so many, and why now? The speculation was varied: as benign as coincidence, as introspective as a meditation on feeling powerless in circumstances where it feels impossible to exert control.

In these last few months of working from home, the most plausible case right now sees all those movies and TV shows as a training montage for the moment we’re living in. And in that moment, we get Palm Springs.

The Sundance record breaker, sold for $17.5 million + 69 cents at the festival earlier this year, arrived on Hulu in early July, as debate around the country newly sparks thoughts of extended stay-at-home measures. We’re dropped into the film in a way that differs from most timeloop content: we join action already in progress. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been living this day, November 9th – read whatever significance into the date you’d like – for an indeterminate amount of time. He watches his girlfriend (Search Party’s Meredith Hagner) get ready to serve as a bridesmaid in the wedding that brought them to Palm Springs, he floats drunkenly in a nearby pool, and rescues jaded maid of honor Sarah (Cristin Milioti, showing a level of talent that makes me all the angrier for how she was underutilized in How I Met Your Mother’s final season) from a reception toast she was unprepared for.

I don’t have to tell you much about what happens next – Sarah joins Nyles in the timeloop, and they’re forced to navigate what it means to share this experience as near strangers, to consider what it would mean to leave, and to evade the danger of another resident of the timeloop (J.K. Simmons, who always excels when he gets to be gruff, silly, and reflective – and he gets to do all of them here).

The movie itself is winning enough – it’s fun and engaging to watch, an extended montage of Sarah and Nyles getting to know each other as the day (days?) unfolds is sweet in all the ways you expect it to be, and small roles from Peter Gallagher, Conner O’Malley, and Jena Friedman inject moments of extra silliness. The music is spot-on, and there are a pair of dance numbers that I defy anyone to not smile through. And although the thing you expect to happen does happen, the journey to the moment has different twists than you might see coming.

But the pacing, not unlike my own days at home, drags at times. Maybe it’s supposed to. Maybe the dragging is normal because when the days blend together, pacing seems both impossible to comprehend and needless to try and understand. Or maybe as the days blend together for Sarah and Nyles, I couldn’t ignore that like them some of my memories were morphing together or that I didn’t know what day it was and most of the time it didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, I get the sense that Palm Springs stands to be remembered not just for what it does as a film, but also for the time in which it came to us.

At one time, Palm Springs was meant to find us in a movie theater – and in some parts of the country, it was released there. But for many who see it, Palm Springs found us at home – either due to a privilege that allows us to stay put, or in the stolen moments after a day confronting the circumstances that have driven us inside. There are a handful of movies that I remember the precise circumstances of seeing. What was going on in the world, why I picked it, what I felt afterward. Moreover, I’m not sure I’ll remember too many specific things about the time I’ve spent cooped up. The pattern on my face mask, sure. The excitement of getting a text that a package arrived downstairs to deliver some essential item or another that I couldn’t risk a trip to the store to get. But Palm Springs, more than any other timeloop content, will represent something bigger, right down to lines like the one that opened this review, “my sense of time is a little fuzzy,” and even one that is specific to the film’s actions but also carries a bit more weight in the world offscreen: “there’s nothing worse than slowly dying in the ICU.”

Of course, the movie wasn’t made to do this- if anything, unlike forthcoming shows like Love in the Time of Corona or Connected, it was meant to represent something else entirely (again, read into that setting date of November 9th however you’d like). But now it’s part of a bigger societal moment than anyone could have expected…and it’s a colorful, charming spot when so many of us need one.

Palm Springs is streaming now on Hulu.

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Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.
Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.