Happy Death Day Review (Film, 2017)
Tree wakes up like this every morning: in a typical young man’s dorm room, wearing a typical graphic tee, living the confusion and regrets one would associate with being murdered over and over again with no way to stop it. Typical college problems.
Happy Death Day is the mashup of a slasher film and Groundhog’s Day. A sorority girl is forced to keep living the same day over and over again. It’s her birthday, and by the end of the night, she will be murdered. She can avoid the original crime scene, but death will follow her to take her and life will send her back to the same stranger’s dorm room she woke up in that morning. That’s the entire concept. The survivor girl is the first victim, the hero, the antihero, and all the 80s slasher stock characters rolled up in one.
I’ll give director Christopher Landon and screenwriter Scott Lobdell credit. They really commit to this concept. This is a time looping slasher film that embraces and subverts all the slasher cliches in one story. Now, that one story is told over and over again like rereading a choose your own adventure book, but it is told well.
I have one major hang-up with the film and it is a rough one to get through. The lead character, Tree (short for Theresa), is so unlikable the first time going through the day that I really struggled to invest in her story. She is the ultimate mean girl. She is cruel to everyone she meets just for the sake of status and has no empathy for anyone. In a typical slasher, this is the character the audience kind of wants to see die; when she’s meant to be the hero, it’s a problem.
I get establishing a scenario where you can justify any number of murder suspects. I get needing to establish some karmic trial for Tree to justify why she is punished with reliving her murder over and over again. I even get making the first few kills of the same character feel enjoyable for the audience—that wonderful morality ploy (they had it coming) from the peak of 80s slashers. I just think Happy Death Day went way too far in making you hate the lead you’re stuck following on this journey for the rest of the film. There’s a redemption arc, but it feels so disingenuous after her awful behavior to everyone the first two times through the day. Let’s call it opportunistic. It’s just too convenient to be believable.
I don’t love Tree as a character, but I love Jessica Rothe’s performance as Tree. She gets to play every kind of character who has ever appeared in a slasher and nails everything from comedy to rage to utter terror.
With that out of the way, I’m so on board with the concept of the film. There’s a wonderful sense of abandon that just feels so refreshing in modern horror. If nothing is going to stick other than memories, you might as well swing for the fences with every chase and murder scene. Happy Death Day pays homage to the best and the worst of slasher iconography and even has some brand new twists on old favorites. The murder scenes are filmed really well with precise editing and wonderful use of lights and sounds. They go between scary and campy and neither feels out of place in this scenario. There’s also some really wonderful play with how reliving the murders actually effects Tree, which adds an unexpected level of depth and urgency to the concept before it starts to feel stale.
The acting is great. Jessica Rothe plays Tree really well. I might not like the character arc, but I love Rothe’s interpretation of it. She finds so many layers to the recurring sequence that opens every day: Tree wakes up, interacts with the young man who brought her home after a party, then takes the long walk from the on-campus dorms to her sorority house on the outskirts. She makes that recurring journey funny, sad, scary, frustrating, boring, and everything in between with her body language and facial expressions. It’s a challenging concept to get right and Rothe’s performance is ultimately what has to hold the screenplay together. I buy the concept because she sells the variations on the same day so well.
If I’m getting picky (and I am), I will say that I don’t find any of the potential resolutions to the story particularly satisfying. They technically work. They’re well written. The editing, direction, design, and performance of the scenes are all great. I just don’t believe them. Misdirection only works when the option presented to the audience feels real. The Scream series, the clearest tonal parallel to Happy Death Day, really nails the “here’s the ending (jk though, here’s the real ending)” conceit in horror comedies. Happy Death Day goes for a similar series of twists and falls short, like, say, Urban Legend or Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. You can have a justifiable twist and have that twist still feel underwhelming after all the wonderful storytelling that came before.
Happy Death Day is a solid slasher film. I had a lot of fun watching the film, even if I felt pushed outside the narrative by the severity of Tree in the beginning of the story. This really feels like an event horror that would have been best experienced in a theater or with a crowd. I could imagine a whole crowd laughing, screaming, and cheering with all the different recurring gags ending in new well-executed slasher chase scenes and deaths. Happy Death Day doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. It’s a high concept horror film and it is going to explore every aspect of that Groundhog’s Day meets slasher concept until no options remain. Happy Death Day aims for something novel in the slasher genre and that’s worth celebrating.
Happy Death Day is currently available to stream on MAX GO. It’s also available to rent or purchase on all the major digital platforms.
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