Watch every day of Groundhog Day simultaneously
Watch every day Bill Murray's character spends in a time loop in Groundhog Day in this dizzying 31-minute supercut
Happy Groundhog Day, everyone! Yes, maybe it’s not a day you circle in your diary, like Valentine’s Day or Halloween, but every 2 February is another excuse to rewatch the brilliant Bill Murray comedy named after the rodent-based US festival.
For those uninitiated, the 1993 film, directed by Harold Ramis, follows a cynical TV weatherman named Phil Connors (Murray), who for some unexplained reason begins to relive the same day over and over again. That day is his visit to the traditional Groundhog Day celebrations in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where every February 2nd crowds gather to see if a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil will predict the coming of spring.
It’s apt that a film about repeating the same day over and over again stands up to rewatch after rewatch. As a nifty programming gag, cinemas often schedule screenings of Groundhog Day as a double bill, so audiences, like the film’s anti-hero, are put into a kind of existential time loop.
Filmmaker Neil Fennell has come up with one better, and created a video essay that plays all the days we see in Groundhog Day simultaneously across one frame (the number of days Phil repeats isn’t revealed in the film, but the filmmaker has counted 37).
“I wanted to see what it would be like if the events of the movie Groundhog Day all took place simultaneously,” Fennell wrote below the video on YouTube, “The film shows 37 separate days from Phil's thousands of Groundhog Days in Punxsutawney. Every frame of the movie is used from days one to 37, with the exception of a few crossfades.”
If Fennell’s film does one thing, it shows Ramis and his cast’s skill at repeating scenes and playing them almost identically while Murray’s Phil slowly goes crazy in his picturesque purgatory.
Take a look at Fennell’s dizzying film in the player above.
Groundhog Day plays on a loop each day of Glasgow Film Festival; Flat 0/1, 22 Feb-3 Mar, 6pm. Click here for tickets