Oliver Tomkins looks for a way out of Groundhog Day

It’s February 2020, and I’m on my annual Groundhog Day movies marathon. If you don’t know it, Groundhog Day is about a man stuck in a time-loop on 2 February, where every day is the exact same as the day before. In recent years it has spawned a whole subgenre of similar movies with varying spins on that central time-loop premise: The Edge of Tomorrow is Groundhog Day in space; Happy Death Day is Groundhog Day as a horror slasher. I find these films absolutely fascinating in comparison with one another – what is preserved and what is changed in each iteration, each just a little bit different from the film before it, repeated and reimagined without end….

Oliver Tomkins is studying film at York University

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This is an extract from an article published in the March 2022 edition of Reform

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