2025, Nicholas Clifford (feature debut) -- download
[Toasty] I went into this movie expecting a comedy. Most Loopties, when not focused on the scifi elements are comedies. This has all the possible situations of a comedy, but comes off... sad? Unlike the seminal Groundhog Day (are we ever going to write-up that one?) where Phil is a laughable asshole, Minnie comes off as a proper asshole.
[Toasty] So, plot. Minnie (Emily Browning, American Gods) is a doctor (anaesthesiologist) in Australia. Yes, this is a proper Australian movie, not Australia pretending to be America, nor structuring it in a way that American film audiences can absorb. Its just an Australian movie for Australian audiences. Anywayz, its New Year's Eve 1999 and Minnie has lots of regrets, which are lit on fire when she finds here ex-fiancée is having a baby with his new wife, in her hospital, with her assigned. She's upset, its only been six months! Except its been over two years, and her sleeping with her buddy Joe the night before the wedding is what ended things. And in that mindset, she ends up at friend Rodney's NYE party, hearing that Joe (Sean Keenan, The Power of the Dog) has come back from the US. Everyone assumes they will end up in bed.
Minnie is not the best person.
The night begins with Max (Contessa Treffone, Totally Completely Fine) & Flick (Anna McGahan, Picnic at Hanging Rock), her friends with whom she is crashing, giving her a 10 year old bottle of tequila, something from the friend-trip to Mexico that Minnie missed.
[Kent] Basically Minnie's life's a mess. She's 36 and it seems like everything is falling apart (along with her ex having a baby, Max and Flick telling her she needs to move out... I mean are we to assume that Minnie has been living at their place for two years? And she's a doctor! Surely she can afford her own place?). When she hears Joe, her former best friend who she slept with, has returned from America, she basically fixates on him setting her life straight by them finally getting together.
How did the Loop Begin?
[Toasty] Minnie has a swig from the tequila bottle on the doorstep of Rodney's (Ashley Zuckerman, Succession) palatial house. We see a quick trigger between uncapping the fancy bottle's devil cap, and a dropping of a lipstick tube, in that she picks it up but its almost instantly back on the ground. Technically this only triggers the loop, but the first loop is after a LOT of subsequent drama.
Said drama includes Minnie spinning out, slamming headlong into a glass door & breaking her nose, almost kissing Joe in the bathroom, having a tête-à-tête with a cocaine snorting doctor friend of Rodney's, discovering Joe has appeared with his new American girlfriend whom he is proposing to, and Rodney faking out the Y2K effect on his ex-tech-specialist wife Pia (Pallavi Sharda, Black Site), who is more than a wee bit paranoid about Y2K. Minnie runs through all this drama and finally responds by swigging on the tequila.
Bink, back at the doorstep where she uncapped it.
[Kent] Normally in a time loop there's a whole precursor sequence of things that happen, of unique little events for the audience to pick up on that will be the benchmarks of the the loop. It's curious that the precursor sequence spans only about 12 seconds with no unique signifiers, and that all the "moments' happen in the first full loop.
[Toasty] I swore the convenience store was going to end up being part of said "precursor sequence" and was weirded out it was just part of the later plot, i.e. she finally gets the ice.
What was the main character's first reaction to the Loop?
[Toasty] The usual. Unsure of herself. Major sense of déjà vu. But more than in most of these movies, she is convinced that she is not back doing it again, but that people are fucking with her. Until its too apparent she is living it again.
[Kent] She even starts thinking the time loop was caused by Y2K, so she goes to Pia to see if she can help figure out what's happening, but it turns out Pia's post-partum depression has manifested into extreme paranoia about Y2K. She's crying for help, but Minnie's too self-involved and Joe-focussed to hear it.
[Toasty] Oh yeah, I think that was supposed to be a much larger part of the movie, especially considering when it was taking place.
WHY did the main character get put into the Loop? Can someone else be brought into the Loop?
[Toasty] The bottle. Its a magic bottle of tequila - Orina del Diablo (the devil's piss) with a magical overly large glowy tequila worm inside. And while someone cannot be brought into the loop, there is more than one bottle of tequila.
[Kent] Well, it's got a worm, so it's mezcal... as Max keeps reminding us... but yes, someone can be brought in the loop as we learn in the penultimate time loop where Minnie shares one of her last two shots and they both blip in time and reset to the same point when Minnie arrived at the door and took the first swig. It's actually a neat little effect I'm not sure I've seen before.
How long is this time Loop? What resets it? Can you force the reset?
[Toasty] Technically the loop lasts until the next swig of tequila. We don't test death as a reset. The movie is dark (emotionally) but its not that dark.
[Kent] As we see a time loop can last 12 seconds or forever. The big secret is that Rodney has his own bottle of time travel tequila, which he got a decade earlier and has used to improve his life, but he's had one last shot which he hasn't taken because he doesn't want to blip his daughter out of existence. Rodney, frankly, used his bottle to try and improve his life (by going through his medical finals five times over and erasing probably some sizeable mistakes). Frankly it seems like Rodney put some calculated thought into his uses, while Minnie has just impulsively been slamming the bottle down in one night. Rodney's kind of appalled by Minnie's narrow-mindedness. Of course, Minnie raises ethical issues for what Rodney's done, but it's not very thoroughly explored.
But I have to wonder... if, say, Minnie died, and then someone drank a swig from her bottle, would it reset to her arriving at that door? if Minnie drank Rodney's last drink, would everything go back 10 years in time? I'm really curious how this works.
[Toasty] Well, considering how it is named, I think the movie is implying some Faustian-test connection and death would be death. But given we have two characters here with their own loops, and a new one once C-Word swigs the last drop, there is no "sacred timeline" -- they all happen in parallel? Yes, this is a fun one to wrap your head around and postulate but I thoroughly believe we are thinking more about than the screenwriters did.
How long does the main character stay in the Loop? Does it have any affect on them, their personality, their outlook?
[Toasty] About a dozen loops? As many loops as it takes to empty a bottle of tequila. This is one of the rare movies where we see all the loops, consequences and actions taken. There are no "speed run" loops just for the fun of it; all are designed specifically for Minnie to get what she wants -- get Joe in front of her again, in the bathroom, so she can finish that kiss.
Does it change her personality? For most of the loops she ... gets worse? Minnie is quite the asshole, only concerned with what she wants, almost to the very end. But slowly, she does notice the things happening to the others, for example Pia and Rodney not dealing well with becoming parents, having to exchange their partying lifestyles for responsibility. She sympathizes, sets Rodney straight but then... let's fuck Joe over again with his new fiancée.
[Kent] Toasty is very unkind to Minnie who is having a bit of a crisis and the power of the time loop is only exacerbating it, not helping. At times she's very close to having a psychotic break, methinks. I agree it's very hard to watch as Minnie lashes out because she's put her hopes in correcting all of her life's disappointments on the promise of reconnecting with Joe, only to eventually learn that he's just a back-up plan, that they're kind of toxic for each other.
I think the negative effect a loop has on someone is exemplified when Rodney joins her in a loop and he proceeds to get wasted and acting on his worst behaviour when he's supposed to be fixing his relationship. There's sort of an intoxicating effect to drinking the tequila (imagine that) that maybe lowers inhibitions and doesn't leave them thinking clearly.
[Toasty] You know that I believe that no matter what shit is going on in your life, or inside your own head, your decisions are your decisions, bad or good. And maybe its the alcohol to blame, but Minnie consistently makes bad and worse choices. Her "crisis" has been going on for over two years and that doesn't excuse from how she behaves. Maybe I could be more sympathetic, but she's a fictional character, in my timeline, so I am less forgiving.
What about the other people in the Loop? Are they aware? Can they become aware? Does anything happen if they become aware?
[Toasty] Well..... one other person becomes aware, not while in the loops, but once he spies the bottle. He also has a bottle, one with a single swig left, one he is afraid to take because he uncapped his bottle all the way back in Mexico, ten long years ago. If he resets, then he takes back his child. But, he was never aware of things while in Minnie's loop.
[Kent] So a number of times Minnie tries to convince people that something hinky is going on, and it's only when Rodney becomes aware of her bottle that she seems less alone. But the power of the loop is a highly tempting draw and Rodney wants that power. And then there's Seiwart/C-Word, the gross OBGYN that Minnie keeps meeting in the bathroom each loop... in the final loop, he wants to believe.....
What does the main character think about the other people in the Loop? Are they real? Do they matter?
[Toasty] Yes, they are real, but Minnie is never beyond manipulating, using and abusing her friends in real life, outside the loop, so while doing her utmost to have the evening turn out in her favour, she doesn't care who she hurts. So, in a lot of ways, no they do not matter. But that's not time loop metaphysics, that's just an asshole.
[Kent] I get the sense you don't like Minnie very much Toasty, lol.
I think going back to the question of her personality and how it changes in the loop, it goes hand in hand with how she treats other people. She knows the power of the loop means there are no consequences so she doesn't even consider other people, only her own narrow-minded interest.
It's really not until like, the second-last loop that she starts to see that there's more going on around her, that her friends have been or are in trouble and that maybe the solution to her own problems don't lay in Joe, and that maybe she's in a position to help others rather than herself.
[Toasty] Again, I compare her to Phil. Phil was an utter jerk, but positioned as the comical element, we chuckled at him and his time-looped misfortune. Phil spends a loooooong time becoming a better person, so I guess I should soften on Minnie considering it took her less than a dozen drunken loops to sober up to her situation?
Most memorable event in a Loop? Most surprising event during a Loop?
[Toasty] To be honest, the most surprising thing is when she fucks the cocaine doctor dude -- like, just outright walks up to him in the bathroom and let's him use her. Except, she's using him. During this loop she has realized she's not getting Joe, that all of her friends have lives they like, partners they love, except her. So, why not have a baby with a random stranger in the bathroom. Minnie's the worst.
[Kent] So uncharitable, Toasty. But I would agree that was shocking, and gross. But I think the most memorable was when she's trying to recreate the "walk into glass door" moment, only to bask through the glass door and cut herself up so horribly.
How does this stack up in the subgenre?
[Toasty] Grim-ly. It was packaged as a comedy, but it most definitely is not. Sure, many comedies focus around assholes being assholes but nothing presented in the movie is ever funny. Its not meant to be. Its meant to show that even the worst can grow, once they care more for others than themselves. And surprisingly, she does. There is no science to the movie, and only a bit of unexplained magic, but as an example of the genre itself, its not really interested in the genre, only using it as ... character exploration?
[Kent] Since I had no expectations, not knowing what I was stepping into, I wasn't expecting "comedy" like Toasty was, but I think when a time loop is not outright sci-fi (or horror) the default expectation is comedy, and this is a time loop drama, for sure with a little bit of dark humor.
It's certainly not even near the top of my favourite loopties, but conceptually I was very intrigued by how it all worked, and I certainly was excited to learn that there was a second bottle... and then the ending had me asking even more questions (does each loop create a parallel reality, or does eating the worm just blip you out of existence?).
It's always hard to watch a character who is self-destructing like Minnie is, and she goes through, like, nine loops just making things worse and worse and worse with no self-awareness, until she finally gets that, maybe, it's not all about her.
Toast and Kent sometimes disagree....
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