“Palm Springs” (2020) takes place at a wedding in — according to the film’s writer, Andy Siara — “the cosmic emptiness of the desert.” The setting is more apt for a “Twilight Zone” episode or post-apocalyptic road trip than a rom-com: Joshua trees cut into a big sky, yellow sand feeds into yellow cliffs and the ground is cracked open by an earthquake within the first minute. It’s a fantasy land that fractures more and more as the movie progresses.
The two leads exemplify wedding guest apathy. Sarah (Cristin Milloti) is the sister of the bride, plagued by a mysterious guilt and not very happy to be stuck with her family on this day of joy. Her cynicism is matched only by Nyles (Andy Samberg), the insignificant boyfriend of a bridesmaid, who is the kind of person to wear Hawaiian shirts and be played by Andy Samberg.
The twist, which isn’t really a twist because it’s in the trailer, is that Nyles is trapped, in his words, in “one of those time loop situations you might’ve heard about.” His comedic apathy comes from his belief that to not go insane he must “embrace the fact that nothing matters” — to buy into the meaningless so firmly that it becomes a comfort. And, after she follows Nyles into an unexplained spooky glowing cave in the desert, Sarah is stuck in the loop too.
In this new world, no one exists as a real person to Nyles and Sarah except each other. To stave off the loneliness and existential dread, the pair fall comfortably into a routine of solidarity, even companionship: birthday parties, road trips, DIY tattoos and shrooms. It’s nearly a meet-cute.
But the dread weighs heavy. Nyles and Sarah wake up on Nov. 6 over and over again. They wake up in this paradise — in the oasis of Palm Springs, on the happy wedding day — over and over again. It’s an exhausting cycle and, even dressed up with fun montages, a surprisingly heavy one for a rom-com. What do you do when nothing you do matters?
In “Groundhog Day” (1993), the original time loop movie and an obvious inspiration for “Palm Springs,” the endless days served as a comedic device to teach Bill Murray’s asshole character that it’s worthwhile to be a good person. Some of that moral remains in “Palm Springs” — obligations to other people as an antithesis to mind-numbing nihilism — but Nyles and Sarah are just too staunchly cynical for a simple lesson-learned hero’s arc.
Here, the time-bending setup brushes up against an apocalyptic spirit, an end-of-everything wildness. It’s a weird situation, but “Palm Springs” is a weird movie, one that doesn’t shy away from the absurdity of its world but instead plays it for laughs: hallucinated dinosaurs, flimsy quantum physics, earthquakes and magic caves. Even visually, the setting of the sprawling desert belies an otherworldliness. Nyles and Sarah, in the middle stretch of the film, live with a devil-may-care attitude as if the world is burning.
“Here, the time-bending setup brushes up against an apocalyptic spirit, an end-of-everything wildness. It’s a weird situation but “Palm Springs” is a weird movie, one that doesn’t shy away from the absurdity of its world but instead plays it for laughs: hallucinated dinosaurs, flimsy quantum physics, earthquakes and magic caves.”
In the beginning minutes of the movie, before Sarah has been roped into the time loop, Nyles gives a toast to the bride and groom. “We may be born lost. But now you are found,” he serenades with theatrical sentimentality, mocking the whole day in a way that only Sarah picks up on.
“Palm Springs” isn’t proselytizing in the least, but this line is nearly identical to one in the hymn “Amazing Grace”; Nyles’ speech has all the makings of a sermon. The feeling of some larger all-encompassing, powerful and uncontrollable thing — “Here you are standing on the precipice of something so much bigger than anyone here,” he says to the happy couple.
After “Groundhog Day” came out, viewers of faiths from Buddhism to Christianity interpreted the plot as a demonstration of spirituality. The endless regenerations of samsara; the chance to improve yourself unto ultimate perfection; life after death; endless repeated apocalypse. Neither “Groundhog Day” nor “Palm Springs” were intended as religious, but it’s an understandable interpretation.
Here we’re reminded of the uncontrollable, mysterious force driving the narrative forward: whatever happened to create the time loop and the freaky glowing cave. As “Palm Springs” progresses and Nyles and Sarah delve further into carelessness, so do we: even just watching their lives becomes claustrophobic, exhausting. It’s like living the last minute before the world ends, over and over again.
So what do they do? What to do as the world ends, and ends, and ends? Well, without spoiling anything, “Palm Springs” is still a rom-com. There is still a rom-com ending.
Something switches. Nyles and Sarah, at different times, decide to not act as if nothing matters. “I think that life should be shared now,” Nyles realizes, in a big, last-minute rom-com-style confession of love. The comfort of the meaningless and absurd and destructive is replaced with a comfort in just being together. For everything philosophical, meta and existential that “Palm Springs” thinks about, in the end it’s just two people who choose to be together.
Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is from Austin, Texas. She enjoys ‘Die Hard,’ going two-stepping, and sci fi love stories.
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