live each day as if you will live forever
I’ve heard of the saying before: groundhog day. Long ago. But I’ve never watched the movie. Knowing the saying, I thought this could be a fun, silly watch with nothing much explored.
I’m already inclined to like dystopian movies and books. I’ve been told the recipe to a good dystopia is making one radical change and keeping everything else the same. For this movie, everything is the same—the problems of work, love, and life remain—except that the character relives the same day over and over again. That recipe worked.
Watching it made me think about another topic making its rounds online: agency. What does it look like to have no agency? What about high agency? And should we maximize our agency?
As I spend my days here, in between graduating and starting another mandatory course of studies before starting work, my days have blended together. Weekdays into weekends into weekdays. Some days, I’m unhappy to report, I flounder around. Waffling around decisions. It’s also on one of those days where I learned the root of the word “decide”. Tracing it back to French then Latin, is the word “decidere”. A combination of “de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’”. The word decide shares similar roots to homicide and suicide. And I’m made uncomfortable with the reality that I have to cut off other things when I decide to do one thing. It’s why this movie review comes today, three days after I watched the movie and two days after I should have reviewed it.
A side effect of tracking movies is, during the movies I start thinking about what rating to give. I was cruising through the movie with a stable four out of five. I was skeptical of whether a movie with such a silly premise deserves to eke out a four and a half. But near the end of it, I had realized the smile on my face stayed throughout the movie. Four and a half it is. For a movie where the very premise of it is repetitive, it still found ways to surprise me. Or maybe I’m just bad at these things—seeing the future.
Comments? Typos? Text or email me.
First published on Letterboxd on 6 July 2025.
2 minute read. Writing time: untracked. Editing time: untracked.
First published:
August 5, 2023
Last updated: