“Happy Death Day” Movie Review

Happy Death Day is a movie about a college girl who wakes up on her birthday in a dorm with a boy named Carter. As her day goes on, she gets a weird feeling and later that night a masked figure kills her. The next day she magically wakes up back in the same dorm unharmed. This keeps happening and she will keep reliving her birthday until she finds her killer. Jessica Rothe plays main character Tree Gillman, a stuck up college girl who only cares about herself. The dorm she wakes up in belongs to Carter, a nice boy who helped her out the night before and tries to help her find her killer, played by Israel Broussard.

“Happy Death Day” received a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the reviews from peers and on social media were not good. The trailer made it seem like a great movie, but on the whole the entire film was a disappointment. It starts off really slow, showing the full day of her birthday, ending with her murder. Then the audience has to sit through it all again,  a second, third, and fourth time: every detail of her doing the same thing, and it’s very repetitive. It may be the director’s way of bringing home the point that she’s living through the same events, but the execution- no pun intended- is tedious and boring.

This movie does have some strengths.  For one thing, it teaches a valuable life lesson. Reliving the same day, this mean college girl realizes that she doesn’t like the way she treats people and decides to live her life in a better way. However, this small value-added does not overcome the boring repetition and plot holes. This movie wasn’t horrible, but I wouldn’t sit through this again. Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

See the trailer here