No Surrender Cinema: Happy Death Day / Happy Death Day 2U
It’s Tree Gelbman’s birthday, but it doesn’t look like she’ll see the next one; there’s a killer on campus with their sights set on her, and cruel fate is making her relive it all! It’s a case of Groundhog Day gone bad as Tree has to constantly die to make sure she can live a normal life again. Skip the birthday cake for now and dig into a slice of new No Surrender Cinema as we take a look at the two thrillers with the twisted timeline; Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U!
I’m going to venture a guess and assume that all of you reading this right now have either seen Bill Murray repeat his daily routine again and again in Groundhog Day. Even if you haven’t, even minimal knowledge of it with help to familiarize you with the main plot point in Happy Death Day. Tree (Jessica Rothe) is an attractive, stereotypical sorority girl who wakes up in the bed of Carter (Israel Broussard) on the morning of her birthday. Tree shrugs off Carter’s hospitality and his goofy roommate Ryan (Phi Vu) and heads out to start her day. In her travels, she encounters Tim, a guy who seems miffed that she’s not returning his advances; Danielle, the uber-bitch head of the sorority; her roommate Lori, who is judgmental of Tree’s shallow lifestyle, and Dr. Butler, Tree’s college professor with whom she is having an affair. The introductions are all quick and brief, but done so that viewers are aware that there are people with motives in Tree’s inner circle that could be her killer.
It’s not long into Happy Death Day’s runtime that Tree is being offed by someone dressed in a baby mask (which for some weird reason depicts the mascot of the movie’s fictional Bayfield University). Tree’s dead, but unlike the surprising early demise of Drew Barrymore in the original Scream, we didn’t lose a main character that quickly. Moments later, Tree is once again waking up in Carter’s bed, unable to decipher the how’s and why’s of it all. This situation continues again and again, as we the viewer watch Tree’s death be the virtual reset button to her birthday. Eventually, once she’s convinced Carter that she’s not crazy and she’s getting really tired of dying all the time, he suggests that she can use her ability to retain memories of each day to figure out who her killer is. Determining that if the killer can be stopped, so can the time loop, Tree decides to start fighting back mentally, physically, and quite often, comically. Each death is also met with a different awakening, ranging from her waking up and tossing her phone aside and going back to sleep to walking out into the campus courtyard completely naked (though we the viewers don’t get a glimpse of anything below the shoulder).
Like any good horror movie, a fringe character gets thrown into the mix to spice up the red herring soup. Serial killer John Toombs is conveniently being held for observation at a nearby hospital, so Tree and Carter determine that he obviously has to be responsible for what’s been happening. Although Tree gets the upper hand in their encounter, Carter is killed while confronting Toombs, and Tree, who has been falling in love with Carter this whole time, sacrifices herself to make sure that he doesn’t become a victim of the loop. Her day is reset, but all of these deaths are taking their toll on Tree, putting in doubt just how much longer she’ll survive. This opens us up to another encounter with Toombs and the twist that Tree’s killer isn’t so obvious after all, and I’ll admit the way it was done even through me for a loop (though luckily, it didn’t trap me in one). It was a really well crafted reveal that makes perfect sense in the overall story, but not as in your face as a lot of similar movies tend to be these days.
The sequel, Happy Death Day 2U, builds more on the world created in the first film. Beginning the day after the events of Happy Death Day took place, Carter’s roommate Ryan (who was only shown in the brief moments of Tree exiting Carter’s room in the first film) is murdered by the Babyface Killer while working on a quantum reactor for his science project. Moments later, Ryan is jolted awake from sleeping in his car and realizes that the events of the previous day are repeating themselves. Fearing he’s gone crazy, he finds a confidant in Tree, who explains her experiences from Happy Death Day. After learning more about the reactor from Ryan and fellow students Samar and Dre, Tree and the gang surmise that the reactor was what caused the creation of the time loop. When Babyface strikes again, he’s unmasked to reveal a second Ryan, who proclaims that he’s only trying to kill the other Ryan to prevent the time loop in the first place. In a panic, Original Ryan activates the reactor, and all of his friends end up caught in the explosion. Next thing we know, Tree is waking up in Carter’s room again, repeating the events from the first film…or so she thinks. The reactor explosion sent her back into a time loop, but this time she’s stuck in an alternate timeline where Carter is dating Danielle (the bitchy sorority sister from the first movie), the person revealed as Babyface in Happy Death Day is not a murderer, and her mother is alive and well. This is all a lot for Tree to handle, but having her mother back, makes her begin to accept this new world. Of course, there’s got to be a catch, and when Tree seeks out John Toombs (still at the hospital in this dimension) to end his reign of terror, her accidental death triggers another time loop that she becomes trapped in. This is where Happy Death Day 2U truly shines, because when Tree decides to act as a recorder and gain information while purposely dying over and over again, the movie goes into meta-humor mode, including a hysterical suicide sequence (yes) where the fourth wall is broken. I found Rothe’s portrayal of Tree to be even better the second time around, because the way she played the character faced with new (and old) circumstances ranged from emotional to hysterical. Happy Death Day 2U made her into more of a sympathetic character as opposed to your usual “final girl” from a horror flick, especially since she was dealing not only with a new Babyface, but with the decision of accepting her new surroundings or trying reset everything to how it was before.
The Happy Death Day franchise was a pleasant surprise to me, because I’m not a fan of how the horror genre has taken to dumbing itself down to a PG-13 rating. I get the point that it’s all in an effort to be more accessible to a younger audience (and thus, more profitable), but much like current action could never match the charm of Cannon Films, the current scary movie scene has a long way to go before it can measure up to horror’s heyday. Though the rating leaves us with barely any gore, the sheer goofiness of Tree’s deaths is what makes them memorable. When Tree is drowned in a fountain, she wakes up coughing up water. When she downs a jug of Liquid Plumber, she wakes up and frantically reaches for a water bottle to rinse her mouth out. While the HDD films lack the jump scares of its peers, their outrageousness is unmatched. We’ve got a likable cast, a fun story interwoven into both films, and a nice balance of thriller and humor that allows the runtime of each movie to fly by. As Tree, Rothe is a perfectly cast as the girl who everyone thinks is perfect, but isn’t without her flaws. The subplot in HDD that shows her anguish over her mother’s death prior to the movie timeline adds an almost suicidal aspect to her frequent loop resets, coming off in a way as a cathartic coping mechanism. It’s also the perfect setup for her indecisiveness to restore the original timeline in HDD2U, although her decision also runs the risk of letting the new Babyface Killer accomplish their mission of eliminating one of the central characters.
Both of the Happy Death Day films are airing on the HBO family of channels, apps, and On Demand, and are easy to find on physical media. I enjoyed the films so much that I made sure to add the Blu-Ray’s to my movie collection, because once these fall out of the cable cycle, I wanted to have them on hand to enjoy any time I want. It’s Groundhog Day meets Butterfly Effect meets Scream, and while that seems like a very strange mix of inspiration, the Happy Death Day franchise put it all together for two films worth watching. Wrap up your Halloween season by kicking your feet up and seeing what Tree can do when she’s faced with the worst case of replay value there ever was.
