Stream It Or Skip It: ‘One More Time’ On Netflix, A Swedish Time Travel Comedy About Getting To Re-Live Your Best Day

Netflix’s new Swedish film One More Time combines the DNA of Groundhog Day with classic teen movies for a fresh spin on the idea of using time loops to make yourself a better person. When a 40-year-old woman is hit by a bus, she wakes up as her 18-year-old self and is determined to re-do her life to reconnect with her former best friend. The movie is fun and sentimental, and best of all, it’ll remind you that early 2000s pop music is worth a re-listen.

ONE MORE TIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Someone pops a mix CD into a CD player. Scrawled across the label, it says “Amelia’s 18th Birthday Party Mix.”

The Gist: The year is 2002 and 18-year-old Amelia (Hedda Stiernstedt) is on top of the world. Popular, stylish (as indicated by her Juicy Couture bedazzled sweatsuits and collection of “going out” tops), and dating a hottie named Max, she’s crushing it in the cool department. The film opens on her 18th birthday where anyone who’s anyone has gathered for her birthday party and they celebrate her. But when we cut to the present day, Amelia, now 40, is a loser. She just got fired from her job in retail, and she has no friends As Amelia wallows in self-pity at a local restaurant, she runs into her old friend Fiona, now a famous singer who also happens to have the same birthday. Once upon a time when they were schoolgirls, Amelia and Fiona were best pals. When they were 13, they buried a time capsule filled with their wishes for the future, but when they entered high school they drifted apart and never dug it up. Now that she’s older and depressed, Amelia searches the hillside where they buried their capsule and unearths it. Amelia’s reads “My wish is to become cool.” Obviously, that wish came true. Before Amelia can read Fiona’s wish, the paper it’s written on blows away. She chases it and is hit by a truck. When she awakens, she’s back in her teenage bedroom, it’s 2002 again, and she goes through that time travel phase of wondering whether this is a dream or she’s really back in an era when “Hot In Herre” was the biggest song on the planet.

Fiona and Amelia have the classic “former best friends until one of them became cool and bitchy” dynamic, and Amelia is the cool bitch, while Fiona struggled in high school as a dark, artsy musician that everyone made fun of, including Amelia. But Amelia doesn’t just get one chance to do things over, she keeps waking up, Groundhog Day-style, on her 18th birthday, and she is able to reset things and change up her choices. Where she was once only obsessed with appearances and her boyfriend Max, she keeps trying to get closer to Fiona to reconnect with the one person who saw her for who she once was. She also tries to improve the lives of everyone around her once she realizes that, in the movies, the way to break a time loop is to become a better person. But it’s not working.

As Amelia works on herself and the days repeat, she tries to reconnect with Fiona, who keeps her at arms’ length. Ultimately, Amelia goes back to the scene of her “death’ – the hill where her time capsule was buried, and she reads the wish Fiona made for herself. “I wish Amelia was in love with me.” Teenage Fiona sees Amelia reading her wish and runs away. Amelia chases her and is hit by a bus. She awakens as a 40 year old again, and races off to find Fiona to say everything she never said to her as a teen.

What Will It Remind You Of? Groundhog Day for sure, as there are references to that movie throughout, but there’s more of a teen vibe here. Amelia tries to right the wrongs of her youth to become a better adult like Jenna Rink did in 13 Going On 30, but One More Time tries to capture an era, that time when we were at the cusp of the millennium saturated with pop music and flip phones, that’s reminiscent of films like Can’t Hardly Wait and She’s All That, too. (The recent Emma Straub book This Time Tomorrow is also very similar to the plot of One More Time.)

Our Take: One More Time might be the first movie I’ve watched that accurately depicts early 2000s nostalgia. I mean, we’ve only just entered that phase where the early 2000s are nostalgic, but it made me wistful for the time. (Who knew I actually really like the song “Jerk It Out” by Caesars Palace?) But the throwbacks to the club bangers and unfortunate clothing of that time aren’t the focal point of the movie, the movie is a funny and heartfelt ode to friendship and finding yourself, thanks to the luxury of hindsight.

Though there are quite a few characters in pop culture who pull an Amelia (Lindsey Weir in Freaks and Geeks comes to mind as your classic friend who abandons her former best friend in order to hang with a new crowd), but Amelia only comes to realize that she was shitty to her friend at 40, now that her own life sucks. It’s fun to watch all the ways that she tries to make amends and apply what she’s learned as an adult to her teen years. Though the ending seems to imply that our leads have found love with one another, the more important thing is that Amelia has finally found herself.

Sex and Skin: Characters have sex offscreen and Amelia streaks through her school at one point, but there’s nothing graphic.

Parting Shot: Amelia and Fiona sit on a bench on the hill where their time capsule was buried. As they reconnect, they make prolonged eye contact that either implies they want to be best friends again, or maybe more, and the helium balloons in the shape of the number “40” that Amelia received for her birthday, float through the sky.

Sleeper Star: Miriam Ingrid, who plays teenage Fiona, looks like a young Helena Bonham Carter, and she plays Fiona in a broody, angsty way rather than as a nerdy archetype, putting a very accurate, very early-2000s spin on the jilted friend role.

Most Pilot-y Line: “That sounds crazy. A bit like the plot of Groundhog Day,” Fiona tells Amelia when she explains that she’s been stuck in a time loop.

Our Call: STREAM IT! One More Time is pretty formulaic as far as time traveling to become a better person movies go, but it knows that. It makes blatant references to the films that inspired it (Fiona’s mom even runs a video store! They know a lot about this stuff!). Even though the movie is a feel-good comedy through and through, the Scandinavian-ness of it still made me wonder if they’d just end up killing off one of the main characters or something just to have a less predictable ending. I’m happy to report that everyone lives, and happily ever after, at that.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.