Name: One More Time
Director: Jonatan Etzler
Released: 2023-04-21T12:30:00

In One More Time, a 40-year-old Amelia gets a chance to relive her eighteenth birthday in 2002 over and over again.

Story

It’s Amelia’s 40th birthday and yet her life is a miserable mess. After resigning from her job, she pulls out a time capsule she buried with her best friend of her childhood. In it are her and her best friend Fiona’s deepest wishes.

Before she can read Fiona’s wish, the paper flies off her hands. To catch it, Amelia chases after it and ends up getting hit by a truck. She wakes up to find herself on the bed in her parents’ house, in 2002, as they come inside her room to wish her a happy birthday.

It’s Amelia’s eighteenth birthday that she gets to live again and again. Initially thinking of it as a miraculous blessing, Amelia soon gets weary of the loop. She then thinks that improving as a person might get her out of the loop.

She does everything but address the main issue, which is focusing on her once best friend Fiona, who she left for the company of others and becoming popular. When she realizes her mistake and looks at Fiona’s wish, she gets sent back to the present.

Amelia meets Fiona again and as One More Time ends with the two reuniting in a sweet, romantic moment.

Performances

Hedda Stiernstedt leads the cast with a great performance as Amelia. She’s a mess going into her forties, only a husk of a person with all the glitter and the gold of her peak years way behind her.

Hedda renders the emotional exhaustion and the desperation to feel the high again beautifully.

Tove Edfeldt and Miriam Ingrid provide great supporting characters both of whom play the same person at two different stages of their lives.

Whereas Edfeldt portrays the love for Amelia that still remain alive inside Fiona’s heart with a subtle performance, Ingrid makes the pain of a younger Fiona believable and relatable.

Positives

One More Time is a sweet little Swedish mixture of 17 Again and Groundhog Day. The LGBTQ+ themes and main characters are a breath of fresh air in the Groundhog Day genre.

The early 2000’s are brilliantly rendered through the many elements like the needle drops and the costumes, both of them helping lend a great degree of believability to the era.

Negatives

The film is disappointingly low on the more romantic moments between the two female protagonists, and the rest of it essentially plays out the dozens of clichéd and trite Groundhog Day knockoffs.

The runtime is a bit too swift and even the loop part of the story goes by too quick, taking away from the weight that could have been levied to moments and scenes had they let things simmer and build for a bit.

Whatever transpires with Moa is not further delved into at the end, leaving her arc’s conclusion as a bit of a loose end.

Verdict

One More Time is an overall inoffensive affair as it tries to rehash the Groundhog Day narrative about two estranged best friends finding their way back to each other and rekindling not only a friendship but something more.

There’s heart to the story, with the soundtrack and costumes adding significantly to the authenticity of the nostalgic 2000’s. However, sloppy and unremarkable execution fails to elevate the material into something worthwhile and the finished product barely succeeds the trite the genre usually proffers.