Last year, Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs took Sundance by storm and broke the festival’s record for the most expensive sale of a movie by a meme-y margin of 69 cents. Starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, Palm Springs revolves around two people falling in love while trapped in a time loop on the day of a sun-drenched wedding. While the movie has been praised by critics and enjoyed by audiences, it’s also drawn inevitable comparisons to the definitive time-loop romantic comedy: Groundhog Day.
But Palm Springs is much more than a Groundhog Day rip-off. While it retains a lot of Groundhog Day’s core themes, Andy Siara’s script actively distances itself from the way Harold Ramis told his own version of this story. Both Palm Springs and Groundhog Day are romantic comedies set in a time loop, but the way their characters and premises are set up is totally different.
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a curmudgeonly reporter who’s sent on an assignment that he considers to be his own personal hell: covering the titular holiday in chilly Punxsutawney. Once he finishes his report, he can’t get out of Punxsutawney fast enough, but the roads out of town are snowed over, so he’s forced to stay. The next morning, he wakes up and it’s Groundhog Day again. Every single morning, he wakes up in the Cherry Tree Inn to the sounds of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” Over the course of several years of living February 2nd over and over again, Phil goes from enjoying the meaninglessness of life to trying and failing to kill himself to coming to terms with his miserable existence. When Phil falls for his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell), it finally brings purpose back into his life and he uses the eternity at his disposal to become a better person and win her heart.
In Palm Springs, Cristin Milioti stars as Sarah, who attends her half-sister’s wedding and meets an eccentric guy named Nyles (Andy Samberg) who seems to be able to predict the future. She follows him into a mysterious cave, where she’s sucked through a portal. Suddenly, she wakes up and it’s the wedding day all over again. She confronts Nyles, who explains that she’s trapped in a time loop. As he helps Sarah get accustomed to her bizarre new life, they gradually fall in love.
The main difference is that, in Groundhog Day, only Phil is stuck in the time loop, with Rita none the wiser that he keeps reliving the same day, and in Palm Springs, both the male and female leads are stuck in the time loop. In Groundhog Day, Phil is able to use a process of trial and error to woo Rita – fine-tuning his dinner conversation and slowly figuring out the perfect date across a period of months – but in Palm Springs, Nyles and Sarah are both stuck together.
While everybody around them forgets the events of the previous days, they remember them all, which puts much more strain on their relationship than Phil and Rita’s in Groundhog Day. When Phil screws up in his interactions with Rita (like calling her 19th-century French poetry degree “a waste of time”), he can just go to bed, erase the day, and start over. But when Nyles screws up, Sarah remembers the screw-up the next day, and vice versa. One of the ways that Palm Springs realizes the full potential of its premise is that it doesn’t just cram a standard romcom into a time loop. The existential crisis of being trapped in a single day is what brings Nyles and Sarah together.
This isn’t the only difference between Palm Springs and Groundhog Day. In Groundhog Day, the audience follows Phil into the time loop and sees it through his eyes. In Palm Springs, the audience similarly follows Sarah into the time loop, but at the beginning of the movie, Nyles is already stuck in it. All the existential terror that Phil experiences in Groundhog Day is behind Nyles and he’s made peace with leading a meaningless never-ending existence.
Also, whereas Groundhog Day never explains the specific lore of the time loop, instead leaning into Frank Capra-esque fantasy, Palm Springs has a clear-cut sci-fi explanation for its own time loop. Every morning, an earthquake opens up a cave with a strange orange glowing substance that keeps repeating the day. This explanation allowed the characters to actually try to figure out a way to break the curse, whereas Phil just had to learn to live with it until he was magically saved by his own self-improvement.
In an age when so many promising original movies squander a juicy premise, Palm Springs stands out as a diamond in the rough, offering a fun, fresh take on a familiar setup and telling an entirely different kind of love story within the context of a Groundhog Day scenario.