I consider Happy Death Day to be a lesser Blumhouse production, but the teens and preadolescents at the screening I attended last weekend seemed to love it. I can understand why—for an audience that doesn’t remember Groundhog Day, the premise, which finds a college student reliving the same day over and over (and getting killed at the end of it), might seem inventive. Moreover, the film offers a vision of early adulthood that could seem appealing to kids, presenting college as a time for socializing, dating, and self-discovery. None of the characters are particularly complex, but at least one of them learns to be a better person during the course of the picture, which makes Happy Death Day surprisingly optimistic for a slasher comedy. The violence isn’t even scary, since the audience knows the heroine will reawaken after she gets stabbed to death. Yet in removing a sense of consequence from violence, the movie crafts an interesting metaphor for early adulthood as a time when you can fail repeatedly at life until you get it right.
On another level, Happy Death Day is a low-key celebration of cinema. Landon and Lobdell revel in how their story could only happen in the movies, piling on preposterous complications with self-aware glee. And Landon executes some nice, albeit arbitrary stylistic flourishes that draw attention to the filmmaking process. Happy Death Day sometimes suggests a kid-friendly version of the horror comedies Brian De Palma made in the 1970s (Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie), introducing an enthusiasm for film to younger audiences by tying it to a straightforward story with a positive moral. As movies for junior high and high school students go, you could do a lot worse.
