Trailer
Plot summary
Nyles wakes in Palm Springs beside Misty, his girlfriend, and spends the day at the wedding reception of Tala and Abe, where he meets Sarah, the bride's half-sister and maid of honor. The two leave the party for the desert. An arrow strikes Nyles, and he crawls into a cave, telling Sarah not to follow. She goes after him and is swept into a vortex, then wakes to the same day: November 9, the wedding, beginning again. Nyles has been living this day for a long stretch of time, and he explains that the loop restarts whenever either of them falls asleep or dies. He has given up on finding a way out. Sarah has not.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Palm Springs (2020)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Neon and Hulu reportedly paid $17,500,000.69 for the film, breaking the previous record for the highest sale of a film from Sundance by exactly 69 cents.
- Max Barbakow and Andy Siara came up with the film's concept as students at the American Film Institute, first writing it as an "absurdist comedic mumblecore take on Leaving Las Vegas" about a despondent thirtysomething who travels to Palm Springs to kill himself. Siara later redeveloped it into a more ambitious science-fiction project while writing for the television series Lodge 49.
- Because they needed to distance their script from Groundhog Day, Barbakow and Siara began Palm Springs with Nyles already in the time loop, making it feel like "a sequel to a movie that doesn't exist" according to Siara, and added Sarah as a second character in the loop to serve as a point of navigation for the viewer.
- The project secured a tax credit to film in California, but the limitations of that credit forced the production to film in the Los Angeles area rather than in Palm Springs.
