In time loop movies, women science! their way out
Time-loop movies are having a moment. After a year during which many of us have been trapped indoors, it’s hard to imagine a genre more fitting to our present era, when time itself has seemed out of sync. In three of the best from recent years, “See You Yesterday,” “Palm Springs,” and “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” scientifically-minded women characters play a pivotal role. These characters aren’t merely sidekicks, love interests, or obstacles for male protagonists. Instead, they are the ones saving the day.
In “See You Yesterday” (2019), a high school science prodigy invents a device to jump backwards in time to the previous day and uses it to undo an act of police violence. In “Palm Springs” (2020), two strangers at a wedding are trapped into repeating the day until the woman makes use of their situation to learn multiple fields of science and get them both safely out. In “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” (2021), a teenaged aspiring NASA mission specialist is trapped in a loop with a fellow teen. The pair escape using her knowledge of four-dimensional cubes, finding love on their way home. While it’s tempting to label all time loop movies as “Groundhog Day-meets-blank,” these three recent films depart from the genre’s usual tropes.
In the classic setup for the genre, only one person is caught in the repetitive cycle—a man—making him the only person with real agency for the bulk of the film. Other characters repeat the exact same actions, changing course only in response to the male protagonist’s decisions. In “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s Phil attempts to woo Rita (Andie MacDowell) by using his time to learn about her or develop skills to impress her. In the end, after trying and failing to trick her into being with him, he learns that to win her, he must simply become a better, less selfish person who genuinely cares for her. Rita remains the vector through which he learns these lessons, an object he dances around rather than someone moving and driving the plot herself.
While Rita’s never aware that Phil has the advantage of time to impress her, Sarah from “Palm Springs” (Christina Milioti) breaks from this formula by joining her would-be love interest Nyles (Andy Sandburg) as a knowing participant in the time loop. “Palm Springs” recognizes that there’s something inherently sticky about a person using a magical situation to convince another character to sleep with them who wouldn’t otherwise. When Sarah inevitably discovers that Nyles has taken this tack and lies about it, she leaves the wedding, presumably distraught. When she reappears, the film reveals that rather than crying over him, Sarah spent her time studying quantum physics and general relativity, finding a solution to the temporal anomaly. Sarah returns only because the initiation point of the time loop itself is located near Nyles and the wedding.
In “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” teenage Mark (Kyle Allen) tries his best to use time to impress Margaret (Kathryn Newton), a girl he doesn’t seem to know very well. When he realizes Margaret is also self-aware, he assumes she’ll want to spend time with him and eagerly pursues her, often referencing classic rom-coms like “Groundhog Day” to justify his actions.
But Margaret has her own agenda. It turns out she accidentally started the loop by wishing she could stop time to have more of it with her dying mother. For Mark, escaping the loop is very much about kissing Margaret. While Margaret eventually falls for him, her journey requires her to come to terms with her mother’s death. Mark helps her with that burden, but Margaret’s emotional journey is much more complex than simply falling in love.
“See You Yesterday” is a tense story of CJ (Eden Duncan-Smith), a Black teenage girl whose brother Calvin (Brian 'Stro' Bradley) is fatally shot by police. With the help of her friend Sebastian (Danté Crichlow), she uses a device she designed and they built together, initially for a school science competition, to jump back in time and save him. This is the only movie where the protagonists control time throughout the narrative; they aren’t trapped by any force other than their own need to fix a grave injustice.
Jumping back in time over and over, the pair test different hypotheses for how to save Calvin often with dire consequences. The film ends ambiguously; CJ and Sebastian having so far failed to save Calvin. CJ pledges to keep trying until she finds a way to save her brother without losing Sebastian or anyone else. Some viewers see it as an impossible Sisyphean task and, therefore, assume CJ intends to sacrifice herself so Calvin and Sebastian will live, while others are optimistic about CJ’s prospects. In either case, it’s a sobering look at the enduring presence of systemic injustice in the lives of Black Americans.
In “See You Yesterday,” science is the engine that powers the plot, driven by CJ and Sebastian’s quest to make things right. CJ and Sebastian’s identities are tied up in science; they see themselves as inventors, other people see them as the smartest kids in school, and science is how they will pay for college and go on to do great things. Margaret in “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things'' has similar aspirations for a scientific career, but science remains more grounded in that film, quietly playing a pivotal role without dominating the narrative. There are no “temporal relocation” backpacks or quests for fuel cells, yet like CJ, Margaret’s scientific knowledge holds the key to getting both characters home.
In “Palm Springs,” none of the characters start the film with a meaningful relationship to science. However, much like Phil in “Groundhog Day,” Sarah makes use of her predicament to study textbooks and attend lectures—not to win over a crush, but to find her way home. This change-up of the usual rom-com narrative pulls the rug out from under the audience. It gives Sarah more agency as a character, allowing her to become the story's hero through hard work and persistence. In a moment when most scripts would have Sarah pining for love or even forgiving Nyles for his betrayal, “Palm Springs” gives us a hero who chooses science and saves herself...and magnanimously allows Nyles to tag along.
It’s no surprise that stories about being trapped in time and place resonate with audiences right now. But the characters in these films aren’t just perpetually stuck; they also know how to find a way out. At a time when so few of us have felt emotionally stable or self-actualized, there’s something comforting about movies where the solution comes through logic and grit. These films remind us that we don’t necessarily need to heal ourselves or save the world to find a happy ending—we just need to work the problem and follow the science, like these women did.
Image credit: Individual movie posters from Wikimedia Commons
