Happy Death Day (2017)

 

After a night of drunken partying, university student Theresa "Tree" Gelbman wakes up on her birthday in the dorm room of classmate Carter Davis. She ignores a phone call from her father and dismisses Carter, returning to her sorority.  Her behaviour there is no more friendly: she ignores her sorority sisters as much as she can and when Tree's roommate gives her a birthday cupcake, she throws it on the floor for having "to many carbs".

So, Tree is not winning many friends here.  And when you add in the fact that she is having an affair with her married professor, there's a pretty long list of people who might want to stick a knife in her.  Which is, in fact, exactly what someone does, that very night.

Which would make for a short film, if it were not for the fact that Tree wakes up again in Carter's bed, the memory of her own murder still fresh in her mind.

Yep, what we have here is "Groundhog Day, but a slasher movie", as Tree tries to work out who's killing her (and killing her, and killing her) and why.  And if the whole ordeal happens to teach Tree a few things about being a better person along the way, well, let's hope she'll eventually find a way to live through it and put those lessons in practice!

I thought Happy Death Day was great fun.  Jessica Rothe shows great versatility in portraying Tree's obnoxiousness at the start, and then of first her rising hysteria as she realises what is happening, before moving on to her subsequent later manic experimentation - and more - as she tries to resolve her situation.  Despite how awful her character is at the beginning of the film, she's pretty easy to root for after a couple of times through the loop.

I also that Tree isn't necessarily an easy kill.  Even the first time, she doesn't go down without a fight, and in subsequent loops she learns from previous experiences and tries to find new ways to avoid her fate.  This is a smart choice as making her scrappy makes her more relatable and easy to cheer on, even while she remains quite snotty.  Plus, it's fun to see how her efforts go awry, as they inevitably must, for quite some time!

The script does a couple of other smart things, too.  It avoids any real engagements with the question of how or why Tree got stuck in the loop to begin with, and isn't just dead.  Given her situation, I can definitely understand why this is not something that Tree - and therefore the film - spends much time worrying about.  Seizing the opportunity to survive, rather than worrying about how the opportunity came to be, is very much the name of the game.

I also liked that the film found a way to still make Tree's situation a precarious one.  Without spoiling the details, it quite smartly presents evidence that sooner or later, these loops will stop, and Tree needs to find a way to survive before they do, or she will be really for real dead dead, and not just temporarily non-breathing.

Good stuff.  I see it has a sequel: I certainly plan to check that out!