The geeky gatekeeping and genre movie echo chambers that so often tend to exist in the largest movie discussion subreddits can make using Reddit an exhausting proposition at times for movie fans who feel like every new Star Wars announcement is like another pin being stuck into their personal voodoo doll, but there are still times when the utterly deranged dedication of a singular user shines through all the corporate astroturfing to make you sit up and take notice. That’s certainly how I felt the other day, seeing an anonymous redditor by the name of u/AmityvilleName post that they had personally consumed no fewer than 135 movies in the last few years revolving around the incredibly specific prompt of time loops. Now that’s the kind of hyper-specific, manic and inexplicable user experience I hope to run into when I’m browsing through social media.
To start with: There are 135 time loop movies out there? I think most any of us would have agreed that the trope has been utterly done to death, having long since left behind any particular attachment or reference point to the likes of Groundhog Day to become an entire genre of its own that incorporates everything from science fiction (Edge of Tomorrow), to horror (Happy Death Day), to romantic comedy (Palm Springs). There’s one in theaters (Omni Loop) right now, in fact. But we still wouldn’t have assumed that the number of time loop feature films was well past the century mark, u/AmityvilleName’s project having revealed the sheer glut of lower-budget entries in particular that have swamped streaming services in recent years. And for the record, this is solely feature films: It doesn’t include TV shows with a single, memorable time loop episode like Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Cause and Effect,” or even series entirely built around the premise, like Netflix’s Russian Doll. Nor does the 135 number include any number of movies that u/AmityvilleName ultimately decided didn’t qualify for one reason or another, such as short segments of time looping in something like Doctor Strange, or time travel films that skirt the premise such as Tenet, Looper or Synchronic.
Incredibly, despite providing blurb reviews for all 135 of the films, along with a ranked letterboxd list, the most obvious question of all is not broached in the post: Why did someone choose to do this? Why time loop movies specifically? Why invest hundreds of hours in this particular quixotic pursuit? Not even any of the (presumably baffled) Reddit commentators outright asked the question, with the closest eventually asking “Was this some sort of project?” To which u/AmityvilleName replies: “It was an attempt to keep my sanity during COVID. It didn’t work hahaha.”
Well alright then. Part of me would indeed like the greater backstory of what compels a person to dive this deep down a very specific, narrow rabbit hole, though some other part appreciates the mysterious motive for such an undertaking. It’s nice, in a way, to know that there’s somewhere out there obsessing over a particular niche like this one–it makes you feel less self-conscious about your own objects of intense fascination. At the end of the day, we all get to decide how to allocate our time into our own human artistic obsessions, many of which no doubt seem odd from the outisde.
And of course, the sprawling list of time loop stories put together and ranked by this determined redditor is of course a great jumping-off point for film discussion, which is always the joy of these kinds of lists and projects. His choices are hardly conventional–if someone watched 135 time loop movies, I wouldn’t have expected their #1 overall pick to be 2017 teen drama Before I Fall, that’s for certain. The absolute lowest rated? That dubious honor goes to 2022 low-budget horror flick The Overnight, which I can only imagine must be a doozy. Some of the other ratings, we would broadly agree with at Paste, such as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s mindbending 2017 film The Endless, which features on our own list of the best time travel movies, or Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes. I’d also put in a good word for Christopher Smith’s underseen 2009 psychological horror film Triangle, which I’d take any day over the likes of the more straightforward Happy Death Day.
If you’ve finished reading this and are incensed that I missed your list of 136 time loop movies, by all means throw a correction into the comments. Otherwise, in the spirit of the exercise, please scroll back to the top and begin reading this post all over again.
Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.
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