PALM SPRINGS

*CUT TO THE CHASE*

NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Alex

November 9th. In the Palm Springs desert, an earthquake splits the earth open as a goat looks on. Nyles (Andy Samberg) awakens in his hotel room with his girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner) where they’re in town for the wedding of Misty’s best friend Tala (Camilla Mendes) and Abe (Tyler Hoechlin). Misty and Nyles have bad, awkward sex and she leaves before its finished. Nyles seems dead inside and tells Misty to kill him. Afterwards, Nyles lays on a pool raft drinking beer in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts talking to groomsman Jerry (Tongayi Chrisa).

At the wedding, Nyles shows up in the same outfit. Misty gives a speech, and then when father of the bride Howard (Peter Gallagher) prompts Tala’s sister, Sarah (Cristin Millioti) to give a speech, she panics, having nothing prepared – so Nyles swoops in a gives a perfect wedding speech. A creepy guy named Randy (Conner O’Malley) tries to dance with Sarah – she declines, and Nyles dances over to her. Nyles flirts with Sarah, who wonders what his girlfriend would think – but then Nyles shows her Misty having sex with Trevor (Chris Pang) in the window of their room.

Nyles and Sarah bond, as she says her family is embarrassed of her and thinks she’s a drunk mess. They end up making out in the desert, and as they start to undress each other, an arrow shoots into Nyles’s arm. He begins running as a man named Roy (JK Simmons) begins chasing him down, firing another arrow into his leg as Sarah screams in horror. Eventually, Nyles makes it to a glowing cave and begins dragging himself into it. Sarah catches up to him, and he screams at her not to follow him as he is suddenly sucked into the glowing light.

Nyles wakes up on the exact same day – he’s been in a time loop reliving the same day over and over. He goes about his business and is laying in the pool when Sarah runs out demanding answers – in a flashback, we see Sarah followed Nyles into the cave and woke up on the day of the wedding. Confused and disoriented, Howard finds her behavior strange. Sarah runs out to the pool and dives in to confront Nyles, attacking him – when Tala rushes out to see what’s going on she trips and smashes her face into the pavement, knocking out her front teeth. The wedding party begins trying to help her as she sobs hysterically.

Sarah goes to Nyles to talk about what’s happening to them. She demands to be taken out to the cave, which isn’t there – until an earthquake opens it up, which Nyles says happens at the same time every day. She enters the cave and again wakes up on the day of the wedding. She panics and drives all the way back to Austin – but again wakes up the day of the wedding. She meets Nyles and they go for a drive where he explains his story with the time loop, and says he’s been in it so long that he’s given up and that nothing matters. He says he’s killed himself plenty of times, and Sarah drives into an oncoming truck.

They wake up on the day of the wedding and go to a local bar where Darla (Dale Dickey) is, and Nyles challenges her to a game of darts that he already has perfected and knows he will win. The darts remind Sarah of the arrows, and she asks about Roy. Nyles explains what happened – Roy was a guest at the wedding who had driven up from Irvine. In flashback, Roy meets Nyles at the wedding and they become friendly. They steal cocaine from Trevor and party hard all night until they’re very messed up. Nyles takes Roy to the cave and tells him his ancestors are in there, and Roy goes inside – though Nyles at the last minute realizes what he’s doing and tries to stop him but is too late.

Nyles tells Sarah that now as punishment Roy comes up some days from Irvine and tortures him as revenge. Sarah says Nyles needs to confront him, but Nyles doesn’t see the point. They get lunch and Sarah asks him if he sex with different people at the wedding – he tells her and we see times he’s had sex with Daisy the wedding bartender, Darla, and Jerry. He admits he’s tried with Tala and never been successful. Finally, he tells Sarah how he had sex with Howard – though it turns out he’s just kidding on that last one. She asks if they’ve ever had sex, and he says no.

Sarah comes up with a theory that they’re trapped in the loop as punishment, and that the only way to escape is be selfless and earn your way out. At the next wedding, Sarah stops the ceremony and whispers something in Tala’s ear that devastates her and leaves. The earthquake happens and Sarah wakes up again on the day of the wedding – it didn’t work, so Sarah and Nyles go to a local house he calls his “safehouse” because the owners aren’t home that day to hang out.

A montage happens of the many many days in the time loop – they steal and crash a plane, do a big choreographed dance number, trick Randy into walking in on Misty and Trevor, put a bomb in the wedding cake and “save the wedding”, and Sarah throws a millionth birthday party for Nyles in the bar. One night, Nyles and Sarah camp out in the desert. Nyles says the next moment is all that matters int the time loop. Sarah confesses she used to be married and it ended badly. They toast to pretending not to care, and – high on mushrooms – see dinosaurs in the desert. Sarah and Nyles finally have sex in their camping tent.

Sarah wakes up again in the same morning and it turns out she had slept with Abe the night before the wedding and is disgusted with herself. Nyles tries to talk to her about them sleeping together but she says everything is meaningless. They get pulled over by a cop who turns out to be Roy – Sarah steals the cop car and crushes Roy with it and acts wild and gleeful. Nyles is upset with her and says other people’s pain matters. They get into a massive fight, Sarah blames Nyles for being in the situation, he tells her he warned her not to go into the cave, she says she never should have fucked him, and he confesses they’ve fucked “a thousand times”. Sarah is horrified that he lied to her – he says he didn’t want to tell her. She says she is determined to get out of this day and runs in front of a truck.

Over the next days in the time loop, Nyles looks for Sarah everywhere and can’t find her. Eventually, when the groomsmen are doing cocaine in Abe’s bedroom, Nyles recognizes the smell of Sarah’s hair product on his pillow and realizes what happened. He goes to the wedding and exposes Abe for sleeping with Sarah, and yells at everyone for treating Sarah so poorly. Abe attacks him, and they get into a fist fight which ends with Nyles stabbing Abe in the face with a fork. Later, Nyles sits with Jerry and cries that he misses Sarah and that he loves her.

Nyles goes to Irvine to see Roy and asks Roy to torture him again. He sees his wife and two kids and seemingly happy home – when he met Roy the first time he said marriage was a bottomless pit of sorrow, and Roy explains priorities change. He now realizes he will never see his kids grow up. He tells Nyles that after Sarah crushed him with the car he realized what he was putting Nyles through and that he’s not coming after him anymore. He tells Nyles to find his own “Irvine”, or happy place. Roy says it’s probably best they don’t see each other anymore, and Nyles asks Roy to kill him one more time, which he does.

We see in flashback that after Sarah got hit by the bus, she woke up and confronted Abe about what happened between them. He begins crying and says he feels terrible – Sarah says she’s done being shitty. She spends day after day in the time loop learning about and researching quantum physics. Eventually, she takes the goat and covers it with explosives and sends it into the cave, detonating it once it’s inside.

Nyles wakes up and finds Sarah at his bedside. He apologizes to her, and she thanks him, but explains she thinks she’s found a way out of the loop. She explains if they blow themselves up at the moment the cave sucks them in, they’ll leave the time loop – the goat wasn’t there the next day like it always was. She doesn’t know it it will spit them out the next day, or in twenty years, or just kill them. Nyles is scared to leave – he tells Sarah he loves her, and she questions if he would choose her if they weren’t trapped together, and that it isn’t real inside the loop. He tells her he knows about Abe and doesn’t care about that, but she says she can’t keep waking up in his bed. She says she’s leaving and asks him to come with her – he says no but asks her to stay with him. She leaves.

Nyles breaks up with Misty, and at the last wedding, Sarah gives a truly moving speech and warns Abe not to fuck things up. Nyles is depressed and drinking at the bar knowing Sarah is leaving. He doesn’t know how to live outside the loop, but Darla points out to him that no one knows how to live. He realizes what he needs to do and steals a truck and races to find Sarah. He catches her just before she goes into the cave and gives a long speech, saying she’s his favorite person he ever met, and that he’d rather die with her than live in the world without her. She asks, “what if we get sick of each other?” He says they already are. Sarah tells him she loves him too, they kiss and go into the cave. Just before they are sucked in, Sarah detonates the explosives.

Nyles and Sarah are floating in the pool at the safehouse. Nyles says that next they’ll have to go get his dog that’s staying at the neighbors. Sarah says she never realized he had a dog, just as the family who owns the house shows up and demands to know what they’re doing in their pool. Nyles realizes they must have gotten back from their trip on November 10th.

In a mid-credits scene, Roy arrives to the wedding and tells Nyles he got Sarah’s message about the crazy plan and wonders if it actually could work. When Nyles has no idea who he is, Roy realizes that the plan works, and smiles.

CUT TO THE CHASE

Nyles (Andy Samberg) is stuck in a time loop the day of a wedding, living the same day over and over. The bride's sister, Sarah (Cristin Millioti) ends up following him into a glowing cave and then also ends up in the time loop. Nyles previously let a wedding guest named Roy (JK Simmons) go into the loop so Roy often hunts and kills Nyles as retaliation.

While stuck living the day over and over together, they fall for each other, but eventually have a falling out. With their time apart, Nyles makess peace with Roy and Sarah eventually researches science and develops a theory that if they blow themselves up in the cave they will escape the loop. Nyles, scared of leaving, doesn't go with her, but eventually races to her at the last minute. They confess their love and escape the loop.

During a mid-credits scene. Roy gets a message about the theory from Sarah and goes to talk to Nyles who doesn't recognize him, so he realizes he too will be able to escape.