Happy Death Day (2017)

directed by Christopher B. Landon
USA
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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When I first saw the trailer for this, my first thought was "wow, that looks ridiculous" and I was very surprised to see Blumhouse putting their name behind it. I'm not sure if it was a bad trailer or a misconception on my part, but as it turns out, the thing to understand before going into Happy Death Day is that it is, in large part, a comedy. It does take its characters and their stories seriously, but it's set in almost a cartoon version of what a college is supposed to be like. I'm not sure why this eluded me at first.

The repeated-day premise isn't original, but the movie itself acknowledges that fact. The repeated-day premise with the added intrigue that the person repeating her day has to figure out who keeps murdering her is certainly more original, and it's fun as hell to watch. This entire movie has some serious watchability to the point where it felt strange watching it on an iPad instead of in a theater. I'm separating the concept of watchability from what I personally thought about this movie, because while I myself wasn't overly fond of the idea, the main actress absolutely makes her role work, and scenes like the one where she walks completely naked down the courtyard of her college because she knows nobody will ever remember it are so genuinely energetic that their energy becomes almost infectious.

Being a caricature of college life, and therefore involving a lot of sorority girls, Happy Death Day does buy into that "girl binary" pretty hard, which is unfortunate. Girls are either caring, sensitive angels, or they're deceitful, stuck-up sluts. Sometimes they're in disguise as one, but are actually the other. The main character is the only one who gets afforded any development and even that is simply a shift from one end of the binary to the other.

It feels wrong to count a full twenty minutes of a film's runtime as a point against it, but I wasn't fond of the sort-of twist ending to this. They could have ended it on a nice note of this girl hanging up her old, rude ways and eventually moving on with her life, but I guess they thought the audience needed one more twist in order to stay interested (which we didn't, IMO). Another thing I wasn't a fan of was the romance that developed between the main character and somebody who probably shouldn't have been more than a bit player. It really drives home how hard mainstream cinema tries to shoehorn in hetero romances when a movie can literally be about a girl reliving her own murder over and over and trying desperately to use the time allotted to her to figure out who's doing it, track them down, and kill them, but she still has to fall in love with some college bro while she's doing it.