Hap­py Death Day 2U

The orig­i­nal Hap­py Death Day end­ed with sev­er­al ques­tion marks hang­ing over it, chief among them being the role of moral­i­ty in the whole affair. Like Bill Mur­ray in Ground­hog Day (which is explic­it­ly ref­er­enced at the end of the film), anti-hero­ine Tree (Jes­si­ca Rothe) even­tu­al­ly learns to be kinder to those around her. Unlike Phil Con­nors, she also had to con­tend with a masked killer who was mur­der­ing her at the end of each day. Only once she iden­ti­fied and killed this per­son did Tree break the curse – karmic pun­ish­ment, it turns out, had noth­ing to do with it.

View­ers have had plen­ty of time to get worked up about this lack of answers, but Hap­py Death Day 2U, which picks up direct­ly after the events of the first film, doesn’t afford its char­ac­ters the same leisure: they’re too busy try­ing to sur­vive to think about any­thing else. The quan­ti­ty of plot holes that the sequel is tasked with rec­ti­fy­ing is daunt­ing, but one detail from the first film hint­ed at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a coher­ent expla­na­tion: the unex­plained pow­er fail­ure that occurred with­in Tree’s repeat­ed day. Any­one who’s seen Back to the Future knows that no one can talk about time trav­el with­out men­tion­ing par­al­lel dimen­sions (except maybe Bill Mur­ray). So, Tree is here again, reliv­ing that same day – only not exact­ly as before.

The film spends much of its first act enmeshed in wordy sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions, though there are salu­tary attempts to make these as fun and eas­i­ly digestible as pos­si­ble. At one point, a char­ac­ter stabs a pen through a fold­ed piece of paper, like in Inter­stel­lar and Event Hori­zon.

The imposed time lim­it pre­vents the film from ever sink­ing into bore­dom. Far from rely­ing sole­ly on this struc­tur­al device, writer/​director Christo­pher Lan­don finds inge­nious ways to explore the set­up to its full emo­tion­al poten­tial. After every­thing that Tree man­aged to achieve first time around – becom­ing a bet­ter per­son, find­ing a love­ly boyfriend in Carter (Israel Brous­sard) and stop­ping a ser­i­al killer’s mur­der spree – the fact that she has to start all over again is gen­uine­ly heartbreaking.

But the breach in the space-time con­tin­u­um brings with it oth­er, unex­pect­ed changes which are even hard­er for Tree to reck­on with. While the first film focused on hav­ing the courage to change things – on seiz­ing the day and the future – Hap­py Death Day 2U dips into the even murki­er waters of the past: the things that can­not be changed. This may not be a film about kar­ma, but it is def­i­nite­ly about consequences.

With one par­tic­u­lar­ly affect­ing sequence, the film joins the ranks of Bum­ble­bee as an unex­pect­ed­ly poignant genre movie aimed at teenagers. Rothe does an impres­sive job of keep­ing our atten­tion through­out this intense whirl­wind of a film, con­vinc­ing in both its emo­tion­al moments and its lighter ones, of which there are plen­ty. Else­where, the three quan­tum physics stu­dents seem­ing­ly respon­si­ble for the whole mess are played by actors so love­able it seems safe to assume the next sequel will give them more to do.

The film owes its genre cre­den­tials to the extreme dark­ness of its con­cept rather than to graph­ic vio­lence; some may argue it doesn’t even qual­i­fy as hor­ror. In truth, it doesn’t need such qual­i­fiers: com­bin­ing a fun and sil­ly genre approach to the con­cept of dying with an earnest con­sid­er­a­tion of its real-life con­se­quences, Hap­py Death Day 2U is sim­ply a mat­ter of life and death, both lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly speaking.