Two teens who live the same day repeatedly, enabling them to create the titular map.
I wasn’t expecting this film to touch me on so many different levels. The trailer had a “Groundhog Day” feel to it and I love movies where characters have to keep living the same day over and over until they figure out why they got stuck there in the first place. In that regard, it follows in the footsteps of “Groundhog Day” and “Edge of Tomorrow” and is an entertaining piece of celluloid but the heart of the story runs much deeper as the film progresses.
Kyle Allen plays Mark, your typical seventeen-year-old teenager who lives in small-town USA. He is not the town jock, or a nerd, just a kid who is living the quintessential, everyday life of an American teenager. When we are first introduced to him, he is already living the same day over and over. We are never told how long he has been in this temporal loop but long enough for him to be able to anticipate his family’s every word and move, including those of the town inhabitants. Every day, he makes his way around town, helping people avert minor accidents and mishaps. He is way past the point of trying to understand how this is happening, instead, he just deals with it and tries to live the best life he can, even though the day resets at midnight every night.
While at a swimming pool one afternoon, he sees a girl make her way to the water, only to receive a beach ball to the face, knocking her into the pool. He decides to use the loop to perfect his chivalrous, noble-minded technique so he can swoop in and save the day, hoping she will go out with him. After a few tries, he is ready for his foolproof plan to work but just as he is about to catch the ball, a mysterious young blonde woman named Margaret (Kathryn Newton) walks by and catches it instead, preventing Mark from achieving his objective. Having never seen her at this exact moment in time before, he is intrigued by her and follows her. For a few days, he tries desperately to track her down but with no success.
One afternoon, he sees her standing outside a store and rushes up to her and introduces himself. She doesn’t seem interested but when he asks her if she happens to be living the same day over and over, she answers yes. Apparently, they are the only two people who keep reliving the same day and can remember each day, unlike everyone else around them. Over time, they form a bond and spend every day having fun but every evening at 6 pm, she leaves him and won’t say why. As Mark studies the people around him, he suggests that they take the time to find all the perfect moments from the town, not from themselves, but from everyone and everything else. He believes that if they capture all the perfect moments of the day and document them on a map, along with their locations and times, the time loop will stop and they can get back to living a normal life.
She agrees and they spend every waking minute discovering all the perfect moments from around town, from a gang of bikers stopping traffic to allow a turtle to cross the road to the caretaker of a music shop enthusiastically playing the piano when nobody is around, to a hawk swooping down and catching a fish from a lake with its talons, the perfect moments keep adding up but when Mark finds himself falling for Margaret, he tries to kiss her but she stops him and leaves, feeling that he ruined the moment. He sinks into a depression and mopes around every day, not caring about the people around him.
Through his depression, Mark finally learns to live again and care for his family, supporting them in whatever they need. When he ends up in the hospital from a skateboarding accident, he sees Margaret and follows her and then realizes why she left him every day at 6 pm. He quietly leaves and the next day, Margaret realizes that she needs to get on with her life, that her reliving the sad same day, over and over, has caused her to become melancholy and overly pessimistic. She finds Mark sitting with his feet in the pool where they first met and sits down beside him. He apologizes, stating he wasn’t aware of the reason as to why she left him every day but Margaret tells him they found all the perfect moments from the day, except for one!
“The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” is a beautiful love story between two lost souls who through sheer determination and time itself, find each other and embark on a new and uncharted chapter of their lives together. Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen have undeniable onscreen chemistry and you find yourself rooting for them to make things work so they can get together and live happily ever after. Neither character has to deal with any clichéd high school tropes; the school bully, the overzealous jock, the jealous girlfriend, instead, the whole story revolves around Mark and Margaret and there is never a dull moment. Even when the final credits began to roll, I wanted to see what they were doing and where their lives were headed.
Naturally, the film is comparable to “Happy Death Day” and the aforementioned “Groundhog Day” and “Edge of Tomorrow” with the characters even referencing them at one point and much like those movies, our two central protagonists must figure out why they are living the same day over and over and unravel its mysterious origins. Director Ian Samuels moves the film along at a brisk pace and while the story centers exclusively on Mark and Margaret, he also allows them to interact with their families and friends, giving us an overall perspective on each of them, individually but also collectively. The movie is filled with genuine heartfelt emotion and both characters generate an authentic connection that touches the heart and makes you yearn for those youth-filled years where anything was possible, and love was eternal. “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” is one of the best love stories to come along in years and one that will stay with you long after the final credits roll.
Available exclusively on Amazon Prime Video Friday, February 12th
