Review

Culture

Film & TV

6 March 2024

7 min read

Perpetually present in Palm Springs

A movie's time loop explores the meaning in the mundane.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A young couple lounge on floating rings in a swimming pool.

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg ponder time.

Hulu.

I first watched Palm Springs on the evening of my wedding day. It was the very beginning of what would be a peaceful and relaxing honeymoon, sandwiched in-between planning a pandemic wedding and finishing graduate degrees, and planning a move across the Atlantic to Canada, where my husband had just got a job – which was quickly followed by getting pregnant for the first time. Those two weeks were the only restful time we got in the whole of 2021 -- and arguably to date! It felt like time stood still for a while. We walked on Cornish beaches, talked about our future, ate ice-cream. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to a deep sense of peace.

It’s quite fitting that, at such a quiet moment in our lives, we watched a film about getting stuck in a time loop at a wedding. Palm Springs’ time loop premise is familiar from cult classics like Groundhog Day. Tala and Abe are getting married on 9th November. An earthquake opens up a strange cave that traps any unwary visitors into a time loop. Nyles, one of the wedding guests and the boyfriend of Tala’s friend Misty (yes, these are their actual names), enters the time loop by accident. Every day, Nyles wakes up in Palm Springs, and every day is 9th November, again, and they’re celebrating Tala and Abe’s wedding, again. He can leave Palm Springs and travel anywhere he likes. But if he falls asleep or dies, the time is reset to the morning of the wedding.

An undetermined amount of time passes, until two more guests get stuck in time: Abe’s cousin Roy, a middle-aged, disillusioned family man, and later Sarah, Tala’s sister. Roy takes revenge on Nyles by torturing and killing him every few ‘days’; he was lured into the cave by a Nyles high on drugs and is furious that he’ll never get to see his kids grow up. In one iteration of the wedding day, Roy finds Nyles and shoots him with a crossbow. As Nyles re-enters the cave to make the day reset and escape another gruesome death at Roy’s hands, Sarah follows him in, not heeding his warning to stay away. She gets stuck in time, too.

And here is where the story actually begins. All of this we find out as a shocked Sarah, having woken up on her sister’s wedding day for the second time, goes to Nyles for answers. For the rest of the film, the sci-fi premise is fairly incidental. Palm Springs is really about Nyles and Sarah coming to terms with their brokenness and their longing for permanence as they get stuck in time – and stuck in love. At first, Nyles acts very cynically. He’s been in the time loop for quite a while and fails to see the purpose of his existence. ‘Today, tomorrow, yesterday, it’s all the same’, he says. His advice to newly stuck-in-time Sarah is to simply ‘embrace the fact that nothing matters’. Sarah accepts the invitation, beginning to act erratically. She and Nyles drive around Palm Springs aimlessly, spend their time choreographing an 80s dance, and she even throws him a ‘millionth’ birthday party. In a darker moment, she intentionally gets run over by a truck, hoping – to no avail – to finally escape. They see their lives just like the lost souls in Dante’s Inferno, condemned by sin to relive the same punishment over and over and over again, for all time.

Love reenchants the aimless and the mundane for them. They’re no longer stuck in hellish infinity.

But something happens in the process. Because they know they can’t leave, Nyles and Sarah lower their defences. Their relationship essentially works as a marriage: they are stuck in it for the long term, and so they become honest. They get to know each other more deeply than they have ever known anyone, and they come to love each other deeply, too. Suddenly, they are no longer waking up dreading more of the same, but excited to see each other again, and spend another day together.

Nyles’ disenchantment slowly disappears. When he first met Roy, drinking at the wedding bar, he cynically quoted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present’. But Eliot’s poem is not actually about the dull, hellish, infinite repetition of time. Rather, it’s about our desire to reach out to God’s eternity in heaven. It reminds us that, when we receive God’s grace, we stop experiencing our lives in a linear way, always looking ahead to new experiences and greater achievements, and instead start finding joy in the mundane. Nyles is finally learning this. He now enjoys Eliot’s perpetual ‘present’, because loving Sarah has allowed him to regain a childlike wonder at the world. As G. K. Chesterton argues in his wonderful book Orthodoxy, ‘Because children have abounding vitality’ they do not tire of repetition, but rather ‘want things repeated and unchanged’:

They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

Roy has learnt this, too. He stops trying to torture Nyles, and rather starts appreciating being able to spend every day – albeit the same day – with his wife and children. When Nyles visits him at his family home, it’s clear that Roy no longer sees repetition as a punishment, and that he’s found a sense of peace.

Finally, Nyles and Sarah realise that the time loop has instead given them the chance to mend their wounds, and come to terms with their mistakes. In a moment of despair, Sarah runs Roy over, causing him several injuries. ‘Nothing matters’, she tells Nyles as an excuse. But Nyles no longer agrees. ‘No. Pain matters!’, he tells her. ‘What we do to other people matters…It doesn’t matter that everything resets and people don’t remember. We remember. We have to deal with the things that we do.’

That’s exactly what Sarah spends the rest of the film doing. She deals with the consequences of her actions and attempts to repair her relationship with her sister Tala, whom – without giving away exactly what happens – she had deeply hurt and betrayed.

I won’t spoil for you whether Nyles and Sarah ever manage to escape the time loop and return to ‘real’ life, but that’s almost besides the point. But I will tell you that they stay together through it all (this is a rom-com as well as a sci-fi film after all…).

Love reenchants the aimless and the mundane for them. They’re no longer stuck in hellish infinity, but are rather looking ahead to the kind of eternal peace we hope to find in heaven, just like I did on my honeymoon.

I recently rewatched Palm Springs, a newborn baby girl in my arms, and it reminded me of when my other child, my son, was first born back in 2022. I remember walking down the street in downtown Toronto, where I was then living, and telling my mother that I felt like I was experiencing a taste of eternity. She was understandably confused by my sleep-deprivation-induced philosophical musings, but there was a reason I said that. Just as time had expanded on my honeymoon, each day feeling like everything stood still, and yet each day so full of variety, so the newborn days of my first experience of motherhood were both very busy and very quiet. But while my honeymoon had decidedly felt like a foretaste of heavenly peace, motherhood has been more complex than that. Sometimes it’s so repetitive that it can seem aimless – ‘how is his nappy full again?’ I often ask myself – and in this it can appear as static as Dante’s hell. As adults, it is very difficult to recapture the kind of joy and delight in repetition that Chesterton writes about. It can really feel like you’re stuck in a loop, every day bringing more of the same, more nappies, more bath time, and more baby food thrown at the wall. But motherhood is also full of the endlessly new little joys. When my son says a new word for the first time, or when my newborn daughter looks at me and smiles, I think that I’d be happy to relive this day forever, just like Roy.

Although I’m not actually stuck in a time loop like Sarah and Nyles in Palm Springs, it can sometimes feel that way. But perhaps it’s good thing. Perhaps that’s what reminds me that being a good parent means getting tired of your kids by the end of the day, then waking up the next morning, and loving them all over again. That’s what being a parent means, and that’s what marriage means, too. As Nyles says to Sarah right before they enter the cave for the last time, unsure if they’ll see each other, and whether their relationship can survive the mundane reality of domestic life, ‘We’re already sick of each other. It’s the best.’

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

War & peace

7 March 2025

6 min read

Bonhoeffer: how to rouse a deaf world to moral action

Comparing today to the past is risky, a new biopic helps us do it well.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A man dressed in 1930s clothing, sits with others at a table looking pensive.

Angel Studios.

Historical analogies are a dangerous, and often inaccurate, way of interpreting the times in which we live. “This is just like that” has a habit of making us react and respond to “that” - which we think we understand so well - when really, we should be taking time to appreciate the nuances of the problems which “this” uniquely poses us now.

That said, I don’t suppose ever, in the last 80 years, have analogies abounded in our media with such ubiquity that we find ourselves in a historical moment facing similar threats to our freedoms and way of life to those arising across Europe in the 1930s.

Thus, the movie Bonhoeffer, Todd Komarnicki’s fantastic new biopic of the dissident German theologian and Christian martyr, appears to come at an opportune moment in our culture.

As writer and director of this two-hour-long epic, Komarnicki’s admiration for his subject shines through like a faithful sun breaking through an overcast sky. And whether you are a Christian or not, there is undoubtedly much to admire in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and the way he lived it.

It's a story worth hearing - which, given its Christian overtones, still has the power to break out of the boundaries of Christian sub-culture to a wider audience, with its message of courage in the face of overbearing evil.

Born in 1906, Bonhoeffer was still a young man when Hitler and his newly formed Nazi party rose to power. He trained as a Lutheran pastor, was an accomplished theologian, and became a key founding member of the Confessing Church – the remnant of the German church who did their best to withstand Hitler’s ideological take-over. (For which, many paid with their lives.) By the early 1930s, Bonhoeffer had already perceived the dangers which few others in the German church seemed able to see or else willing to call out. And after abandoning a short stint of study in the US, he returned to his native Germany to do what he could to call the church back to herself before it was too late. No easy task.

A close up of a 1930s man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, looking pensive.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (colourised).

One existing photograph of Bonhoeffer shows a young, earnest face in steel-rimmed glasses, an expression of wisdom beyond his years weighing heavy on his brow. But for all the seriousness of his situation, he was, by Komarnicki’s account, an ebullient character. Persuasive, playful and able to find joy even in the darkest of times.

In Bonhoeffer, he is played brilliantly by Jonas Dassler, a native German actor who brings an intensity and intelligence to the role which must be a fair reflection of the man himself, as well as allowing room for a levity of spirit, especially in his friendships and family ties.

There’s a scene early in the film, foreshadowing much that was to come. Dietrich the boy plays the Moonlight Sonata at his older brother Walter’s funeral wake. The piece was Walter’s favourite, but none of the mourners pay the slightest attention. Dietrich slams the piano shut and runs off in frustration. “No one listened,” he tearfully complains to his mother. “No one cared.” This theme of rousing a deaf or unfeeling world to moral action runs through the whole movie.

We can all agree that Bonhoeffer is a man to emulate in our own times. The question is where would his instincts lie in the political and cultural landscape of today.

Komarnicki has done a solid job unfolding Germany’s inexorable descent into darkness, often marking key moments as Bonhoeffer the man makes his stand against the state with actual quotations from his work. The most famous serves as the movie’s strapline:

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak.”

The script is peppered with such exhortations, which seems directed as much to the audience of today as they do to Bonhoeffer’s own, eighty-or-ninety-odd years ago. Such injunctions seem all the more arresting as Bonhoeffer’s story pursues its arc from pastor to martyr, and the noose awaiting him at Buchenwald concentration camp just days before Germany’s final capitulation.

It is no doubt hard to frame a movie around the moral courage and conscientious stand of a single man, however admirable that man may be, particularly when so much of the struggle is happening inside his own head. Perhaps that is why much of the less historically accurate material has been included. The thriller subplot – of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler – brings some necessary forward propulsion to the story, but seems the least congruent with what we know of the man. Much of this more thrusting narrative is intercut with scenes of Bonhoeffer’s last days before his execution, the wrestling with his faith and his fate, before a final resolution of peace, even joy in his final moments. “Eternity, eternity, eternity,” he murmurs. A word he used to repeat endlessly with his twin sister as they whiled away the time smoking cigarettes. But a word which ultimately gives him the focus and the spiritual strength to hold his courage to the end. Although slower, these provide a more convincing and compelling portrait of a man who deserves to be remembered as a hero, not only of his own age, but of any age where evil is determined to silence truth at any cost.

As a modern audience, this is where the hazard lies. To return to my original point, it is all too easy to tar one’s political or cultural opponents with the label of “fascist” or “Nazi” – merely because they happen to disagree with you. (And sadly I’ve seen this done by otherwise mild-mannered English theologians over this very film.) Some have said this is akin to shunning another child in the playground because they have “cooties”. It’s over-simplistic and facile. If anything, it reveals the casual propagandising of a suggestible mind.

Few would watch this film and associate themselves with its antagonist (Hitler) over its heroic protagonist. We can all agree that Bonhoeffer is a man to emulate in our own times. The question is where would his instincts lie in the political and cultural landscape of today.

Jesus had harsh words to say to the pharisees and scribes who build tombs for the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous. “You say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’”

How easy it is to assume we would have been on Bonhoeffer’s team.

And this is my one criticism of the film: its portrayal of the bishops and clergy who did succumb to Hitler’s ideology seems too blunt-edged. They rail from the pulpit in the manner of the Fuhrer himself, marking them as ravening ideologues; they bark out Party platitudes, red in the face. I imagine the reality of how Nazi ideology infiltrated and captured the church – as it did many other institutions – was far more subtle, far more insinuating and insidious. More boiled frog than scalded cat.

So it surely is in our day. While National Socialism has passed away, the totalitarian instinct which animated it has sadly not. My prayer is that we have the wisdom, courage, and above all discernment, to learn Bonhoeffer’s lesson and pass the tests of our time.

Komarnicki’s excellent movie may just help us to do that.

Bonhoeffer is out in UK and Irish cinemas from 7th March 2025. For more information and to book tickets visit the film's site.

Bonhoeffer

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