This list of films featuring time loops in which characters experience the same period of time which is repeatedly resetting: when a certain condition is met, such as a death of a character or a clock reaches a certain time, the loop starts again, with one or more characters retaining the memories from the previous loop. The list provides the names and brief synopses of films in which time loops are a prominent plot device.
For a list of films that include any kind of time travel (including time loops) see time travel in films.
| Film | Year | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Le 15 Mai | 1969 | A couple wakes up one sunny morning on the 15th of May. Apparently, they had the same nightmare and the day unfolds strangely. The next day, we are still on the 15th of May. Claire Denis's graduation work from La Fémis.[1] | |
| The Girl Who Leapt Through Time | 1983 | Based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1965 novel of the same name. The story is about a Japanese schoolgirl who accidentally gains the ability to time travel, which she experiments with and attempts to alter past events, leading her on a journey through multiple time loops.[2] [3] | |
| 1984 | The students of Tomobiki high school relive the day before the school festival over and over.[4] [5] [6] | ||
| Mirror for a Hero | 1987 | Zerkalo dlya geroya, a Soviet Union film by Vladimir Khotinenko. Two heroes circle multiple times in 1949, adapting to the harsh post-war life, meeting the parents of one of them, finally returning to the present time, having reassessed their attitude towards elders.[7] [8] | |
| 12:01 PM | 1990 | This short film is the first film adaptation of the short story "" by Richard A. Lupoff, which was published in 1973 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It originally aired on cable television as part of the Showtime 30-Minute Movie anthology series. It was nominated for an Academy Award.[9] | |
| 12:01 | 1993 | The second film adaptation of the short story "" by Richard A. Lupoff, which was published in 1973 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Office worker Barry Thomas is forced to relive the worst day of his life.[10] | |
| Groundhog Day | 1993 | Self-centered television weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is forced to relive the same day over and over.[11] This movie is generally seen as the quintessential time-loop movie by many with its name being synonymous with the genre as a whole.[12] [13] [14] | |
| Christmas Every Day | 1996 | An American television movie based on William Dean Howells' 1892 short story "Christmas Every Day". A selfish teenager is forced to relive the same Christmas every day.[15] | |
| Retroactive | 1997 | A psychiatrist makes multiple trips through time to save a woman who was murdered by her husband.[16] | |
| Run Lola Run | 1998 | The story follows a woman named Lola (Franka Potente) who needs to obtain 100,000 Deutschmarks in twenty minutes to save the life of her boyfriend by resetting time multiple times by 20 minutes.[17] | |
| Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas | 1999 | Huey, Dewey, and Louie must repeat Christmas Day until they come to learn the true meaning of Christmas.[18] | |
| Naken | 2000 | On the day of his wedding, Anders wakes up naked in an elevator. As he attempts to piece together the reason for his predicament, the day repeats itself, and he becomes stuck in a time loop. | |
| Stork Day (AKA È già ieri) | 2004 | Italian remake of Groundhog Day. A TV star goes to Tenerife for a nature documentary and gets stuck in a repetition of the same day.[19] | |
| Camp Slaughter | 2005 | A group of present-day teenagers are sent back to 1981, and discover a summer camp which is stuck reliving the day a demented killer went on a rampage.[20] | |
| Christmas Do-Over | 2006 | A father is stuck in a time loop when his son wishes that every day was Christmas day. A remake of Christmas Every Day from an adult perspective. | |
| The Girl Who Leapt Through Time | 2006 | Anime based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1965 novel of the same name. | |
| Salvage | 2006 | Claire encounters horror and murder after finishing a day working at a convenience store, not once but many times. An official selection of the 2006 Sundance Festival.[21] | |
| The Last Day of Summer | 2007 | 11-year-old Luke gets his wish that every day could be the last day of summer.[22] | |
| Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel | 2009 | Three social misfits navigate a time-travel conundrum originating from their local pub.[23] | |
| Triangle | 2009 | A group of friends go on a boat trip and become stranded due to a storm. They discover a cruise ship which causes them to experience a series of repeating events.[24] | |
| Dark Country | 2009 | A newly married couple drives through the desert from Las Vegas when they encounter a person who was just in an accident. They take him and try to find some help, but are now part of a time loop.[25] | |
| The Girl Who Leapt Through Time | 2010 | Third film based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1965 novel of the same name. | |
| Repeaters | 2010 | A group of inmates at a rehabilitation facility are forced to repeat the same day over and over.[26] | |
| Source Code | 2011 | U.S. Army Aviation pilot Captain Colter Stevens repeatedly experiences the last eight minutes of another person's life to identify the bomber in a terrorist attack in order to prevent a second, nuclear attack on Chicago.[27] | |
| The Road | 2011 | A group of teens finally work up the fortitude to explore a rural road, that has all the warning signs of being a bad idea.[28] | |
| 12 Dates of Christmas | 2011 | Kate finds herself reliving Christmas Eve (including a blind date with a man named Miles) over and over. She must discover how to break the cycle – should she attempt to win back her ex-boyfriend Jack, should she pursue Miles, or something else?[29] | |
| 2012 | Homura Akemi has the ability to travel 30 days back in time, and has done so countless times. Each month, Homura fails in her attempts to save Madoka Kaname from destruction, and is forced to relive the tragedy of losing Madoka.[30] | ||
| Mine Games | 2012 | A group of friends vacationing in the woods discover their own corpses and realize they are trapped in a time loop that they attempt to break.[31] | |
| Blood Punch | 2013 | A trio visits a remote cabin for a one-time criminal endeavor and finds each member independently reliving the same day.[32] | |
| Haunter | 2013 | The ghost of a teenager, Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin), who, along with her family, keeps reliving the same day (although she is the only one aware of it) tries to protect a young girl, Olivia (Eleanor Zichy), and her family from a dead serial killer, the Pale Man (Stephen McHattie), who can possess the living.[33] | |
| El Ascensor | 2014 | On their fifth wedding anniversary, Sitio and Ana start arguing inside an elevator that keeps opening in their same floor. Emotionally and physically trapped, the two will have to work together to find a way out.[34] | |
| One-Minute Time Machine | 2014 | This 6-minute comedic short film directed by Devon Avery and featuring Brian Dietzen and Erinn Hayes, parodies the time loop genre (and itself) when repeated applications of the device are used to redo a botched romantic approach.[35] | |
| Oru Kanniyum Moonu Kalavaanikalum | 2014 | A group of friends find themselves in a time loop with 3 different time slots for the same incident and the result will vary due to the time and the result of people mood.[36] | |
| Premature | 2014 | Rob, a high school senior, has to relive losing his virginity over and over until he gets it right, with the right girl.[37] | |
| The Incident | 2014 | Two stories of groups trapped in infinite time and space loops. One, an endless staircase, the other, an endless road, both looping back on themselves. While time resets in their surroundings each day, the trapped characters continue to age within the loops.[38] | |
| The Infinite Man | 2014 | After a romantic weekend break with his girlfriend goes awry, a scientist invents time travel in order to create for her the perfect getaway, but inadvertently traps her in a recurring temporal loop.[39] | |
| Edge of Tomorrow | 2014 | Maj. William "Bill" Cage (Tom Cruise) and Special Forces soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) team up to fight a hostile alien race known as Mimics, with Cage continually returning to a repeating battle through a time loop.[40] | |
| Magnetic | 2015 | Alice is stuck in a time loop, repeating each week, trying to find a way to prevent the Earth from being destroyed by a massive solar flare.[41] | |
| The Final Girls | 2015 | A group of friends find themselves trapped in an '80s horror movie that restarts every 92 minutes.[42] | |
| ARQ | 2016 | An engineer, whose invention causes time to loop during a home invasion, attempts to save his former lover while learning who has targeted him and why.[43] | |
| Doctor Strange | 2016 | Aided by the powers of The Eye of Agamotto, Stephen Strange traps himself and Dormammu in a time loop in order to bargain against him consuming the Earth.[44] | |
| Erased | 2016 | A Japanese young man travels back in time to prevent the murder of his mother and others, looping through different versions of reality as his actions change the past.[45] [46] (The same basic story exists in manga, anime, live action movie, and live action TV series versions.) | |
| Groundhog Day for a Black Man | 2016 | Short film about a black man who keeps reliving the same day in which he ends up being shot by a police officer.[47] The director of this film accused Netflix's Two Distant Strangers of plagiarism.[48] | |
| Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children | 2016 | Teenager Jake visits the ruins of an orphanage that was destroyed by a bombing raid during World War II and discovers that the original inhabitants survived by creating a time loop set to repeat the day of September 3, 1943.[49] | |
| Naked | 2017 | Rob is caught in a time loop as he keeps waking up naked in a hotel elevator on the day of his wedding.[50] This is a remake of the 2000 Swedish film Naken. | |
| Happy Death Day | 2017 | A college student is murdered on her birthday, Monday the 18th. She wakes up the morning of the 18th, alive, facing the same day over and over, while also getting weaker. She must figure out who her killer is in order to escape the loop.[51] | |
| Before I Fall | 2017 | A popular high school senior finds herself reliving the same day over and over.[52] | |
| The Endless | 2017 | Two brothers return to a cult that is stuck in a time loop.[53] | |
| A Day | 2017 | A father attempts to save his daughter whilst stuck in an endless time loop.[54] | |
| Reset | 2017 | A physicist uses an experimental wormhole machine to travel to parallel universes and back in time by an hour, trying to save her kidnapped son.[55] | |
| The Fare | 2018 | A taxi driver and his passenger find themselves locked in an endless time loop as they have to repeat their journey over and over.[56] | |
| When We First Met | 2018 | A guy’s grief over losing Ms. Right, grief he recovers from by time traveling to earn that magic “reset.”[57] | |
| Koko-di Koko-da | 2019 | A struggling couple on a camping trip is caught in a time loop where they are tormented by a group of fairy-tale characters.[58] | |
| Game Over | 2019 | Swapna, a wheelchair user, is defending her home from a mysterious intruder. Every time she is killed by the intruder, she awakens to the start of the day. However, the concept is more along the lines of how a video game works.[59] | |
| The Obituary of Tunde Johnson | 2019 | A gay African-American teenager repeatedly relives the day of his fatal shooting in an unprovoked police brutality incident.[60] | |
| Happy Death Day 2U | 2019 | Immediately after the events of the first film (Happy Death Day), Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) unexpectedly re-enters the time loop except this time in an alternate reality.[61] [62] | |
| See You Yesterday | 2019 | An ambitious science prodigy uses her prowess and capabilities to create time machines, in order to save her brother who has been killed by a police officer. As she tries to alter the events of the past, she will eventually face the perilous consequences of time travel.[63] | |
| Volition | 2019 | A man afflicted with clairvoyance tries to change his fate when a series of events leads to a vision of his own imminent murder.[64] | |
| Two Distant Strangers | 2020 | An American short science-fiction film that examines the deaths of black Americans during encounters with police through the eyes of a character trapped in a time loop that keeps ending in his death.[65] | |
| Palm Springs | 2020 | When carefree Nyles and reluctant maid of honor Sarah have a chance encounter at a Palm Springs wedding, things get complicated the next morning when they find themselves unable to escape the venue, themselves, or each other.[66] | |
| Boss Level | 2021 | A retired special forces officer is trapped in a time loop on the day of his death.[67] | |
| Christmas...Again?! | 2021 | A holiday Disney Channel Original Movie starring Scarlett Estevez as Ro, whose Christmas wish goes awry as she finds herself living Christmas Day over and over again.[68] | |
| Churuli | 2021 | The film, directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery, tells the story of two undercover police officers who go in search of a wanted criminal named Mayiladumparambil Joy. However, they get stuck in the village of Churuli as eerie mysteries unfold. The original story and characters are based on a short story from the book Kaligaminarile Kuttavalikal written by Vinoy Thomas.[69] [70] | |
| Jango | 2021 | A neurosurgeon who is stuck in a time loop tries to save his estranged wife from being killed by a mystery man.[71] | |
| Maanaadu | 2021 | A man who is stuck in a time loop tries to stop a political rally from taking place in order to save the state's chief minister and prevent religious violence.[72] | |
| The Map of Tiny Perfect Things | 2021 | Two teens live the same day repeatedly, enabling them to create the titular map.[73] | |
| Meet Cute | 2022 | A Manhattan-native, Sheila, discovers a time machine in a nail salon and uses it to continually fix elements of a date she had the previous night.[74] | |
| 2022 | The staff of an advertising agency office are stuck in a time loop except their boss.[75] | ||
| Vandits | 2022 | A group of incompetent criminals tries to rob a bingo hall, only to get trapped in a time loop in which they repeatedly stage the heist but fail in a different way each time.[76] | |
| Zanox | 2022 | Misi, a high school student, relives his graduation day after he discovers his experimental medication has a weird side effect.[77] | |
| River | 2023 | A group of people in a Japanese hospice get caught in a repeating two-minute loop.[78] | |
| Dreadful Chapters | 2023 | Indian Malayalam-language horror film directed by Nirmal Baby Varghese.[79] |