When Tree
Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes in a stranger’s dorm, she hastily departs and sets
off about her day like she would any other, save for her walk of shame across
the bustling campus. That, and when she arrives at her sorority house, her
roommate presents her with a birthday cupcake. But Tree doesn’t care much for carbs,
or even kind gestures for that matter. When night falls, she’s stalked by someone
who’s dressed as the college’s creepy baby-faced mascot. Before she’s able to
get away, she’s stabbed to death. Not a moment later, she wakes in the same
stranger’s dorm, recognising everything thereafter from the busy campus to the cupcake.
And when night falls, the same maniac shows up and kills her all over again.
It might
already be obvious that Tree is trapped – for reasons best left unknown - in a Groundhog Day-style loop (despite her inexplicably
having never heard of said-movie), where she’s not only forced to relive the
same day over and over again, but also relive (or re-die?) her inescapable
death, despite her best efforts to fight back. As the film goes on – or at
least as the same day repeats on itself – Tree seeks help from the
dorm-stranger, Carter, confiding in him her rather unusual predicament, but with the disadvantage that if she’s yet to die again, she faces the
annoyance of having to tell him everything more than once.
Tree has the most effective alarm clock imaginable
The slasher
genre has seen two notable eras in cinema. First, there were the true hell-raisers
themselves that stalked American suburbia, lakeside cabins, motels and even
dreams. Then the mid-nineties saw the ground-breaking and self-referential Scream slash its way into mainstream
horror, reinvigorating the genre and carving a path for its own sequels and the
likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
But despite more recent years having seen somewhat failed or at least
forgettable attempts at rebooting iconic franchises, while the Child’s Play – or “Chucky” – franchise remains (unfortunately) ever-enduring, it’s
reasonable to suggest that the slasher genre has been, for a long time, far
deader than any of its undead machete or knife-glove-wielding occupants. No way
could a new slasher come along without feeling like a repetition of anything
that has gone before. But remarkably, Happy
Death Day, despite of course being very repetitive – and for all the right reasons – may be the mark of a
slasher renaissance of sorts, or, at the very least, it proves that the subgenre
hasn’t run out of new blood.
Perhaps a
fairer comparison, though, would be with 2012’s Cabin in the Woods; a film which demonstrated that, by turning a
traditional concept – or multiple - on its head, originality is, for the
most part, irrelevant and redundant. Happy
Death Day doesn’t just offer a refreshing angle on a decades-exhausted
subgenre, though – with it being arguable that Groundhog Day indeed started a subgenre of its own with the likes
of 2014's Edge
of Tomorrow and Netflix’s hugely-underrated The Arq, it seamlessly weaves two together.
Rothe is also superb as the protagonist, who, embodies multiple stereotypes that usually dominate the typical slasher trope: she’s both a bumbling geek and stone-cold, shallow-as-a-puddle sorority sister, at least before her metamorphosis into the strong-willed heroine determined to survive, all the while with Rothe exuding enough charisma to give Bill a run for his Murray. And while originality is absent – or perhaps subjective – there are enough unique elements here from Rothe’s progressively-weakening state from being repeatedly killed, to the film’s whodunit plot, to keep your eyebrows raised.
No sleep between kills: a fate worse than death
For my full audio review which was aired on Swindon 105.5, click here.
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