Director Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day ended with a conversation between its two main characters that jokingly underlined the film’s obvious allegiance to Groundhog Day. In a no less winking manner, the film’s sequel announces itself as a horror twist on Back to the Future Part II. In Happy Death Day, Tree (Jessica Rothe), a coed at Bayfield University, kept reawakening on the morning of the day she will be murdered—her birthday to be exact—stuck in a loop until she figured out how to deal with her personal baggage while also trying to track down her future killer. Picking up immediately where its predecessor left off, the infinitely headier and entertaining Happy Death Day 2U sees Trish dropped into a multiverse murder mystery rooted in experimental physics.
A minor character from the first film, Ryan (Phi Vu), is revealed to be working on a proton machine that turns out to be unintentionally causing the time-loop curse, not only tripping up timelines, but also now folding parallel universes into each other. Trying to reverse the damage, Ryan and his lab partners (Suraj Sharma and Sarah Yarkin) set off a particle explosion that accidentally thrusts Tree into an alternate dimension. As in Happy Death Day, she’s forced to relive her birthday if she dies at the hands of a knife-wielding killer, except this time there’s a different person behind the baby mask. Also, her mom (Missy Yager) is now alive, and the loveable Carter (Israel Broussard) is her best frenemy’s (Rachel Matthews) boyfriend.
Happy Death Day complicated the “college-campus serial killer” trope with the addition of time loops, pushing its heroine in unusual ways toward emotional growth—to deal with the unprocessed grief that effectively transformed her into a mean girl. Happy Death Day 2U revisits familiar ground, as a murderer is still on the prowl at Bayfield, and Tree is struggling with bereavement and romantic uncertainty, but the addition of multiple-universe theory steers these familiar plotlines in expectation-busting directions.
At one point, in order to break up a potentially monotonous montage of mathematical experimentation, Landon intercuts it with shots of Tree committing a series of spectacular suicides to reset her day, from skydiving without a parachute—and in a bikini—to diving headfirst into a woodchipper. The sequence laces the film with an appreciably dark humor, while temporarily giving a repeatedly victimized woman a little more agency over her life and deaths. Happy Death Day 2U is peppered with such well-earned emotional payoffs from the complicated choices it presents its characters. The scene in which Tree first encounters her essentially resurrected mother is devastating, but even more moving than her soul-shattered surprise and overwhelming joy is her gradual realization that she can’t accept this gift.
Tree is faced with what seems to be a better version of her life, in which her foundational trauma—her mother’s death—has been undone. She’s tempted to choose this new life over her own, to settle for the familiar rather than risk the unknown, to reclaim lost maternal comforts even if it means not taking the chance to discover the potentially greater pleasures of her possible and unknown futures. She has to do the hard work of realizing that the pain we face helps make us who we are, and that the only way through grief is by moving past it, not digging deeper into it. The best genre fiction amplifies mundane themes. Love stories, for example, can be elevated when the stakes are prompted by more than just heartbreak. But Happy Death Day 2U pushes further than even matters of life and death into a realm in which stakes don’t even really apply anymore, concerned as it is not with how we live our best lives, but with how we can be the best possible versions of ourselves.
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