25 Cool Time Loop Movies, Ranked

Summary

• Time loop movies add a special twist to the sci-fi genre, with diverse genres showcasing the versatility of this concept.
• The best time loop movies feature action, horror, and drama, with characters facing their flaws to break the loop.
• From romantic comedies to thrillers, time loop movies offer intriguing narratives that keep audiences engaged and entertained.

Time travel movies are always interesting, but the truly best time loop movies add an extra special aspect to the genre — and do it with style. Time loop movies are defined as when a character, for one reason or another, relives a day or experience over and over again and must figure out what they need to do to escape it. Hollywood has used this concept numerous times for different genres with varying success. So many notable movies have employed a time loop premise, and its influence in sci-fi movies shows no signs of fading away anytime soon.

There are many examples of time travel on the big screen, but cool time loop movies come with their own spin. Time loop plots have been shown to work in just about anything from family comedies to experimental science-fiction, so there’s no shortage of great time loop films to recommend to fans of any genre. The best time loop movies show just how versatile the idea is, featuring a lot of action and horror as well as theoretical science and metaphorical drama. The best movies featuring the time loop idea are beloved classics and cult hits worldwide.

25 River (2023)

People In A Restaurant Repeat The Same Two Minutes

River is a unique Japanese time loop movie that follows a group of people at a small hotel. What makes this unique among others in the genre is that the loop only lasts two minutes at a time. Also, everyone in the hotel knows the time loop is happening rather than one person who no one believes. This creates a situation where everyone does what they can to make changes and try to stop the loop, but they often do so at odds with one another.

The movie plays with comedy and awkward situations, almost as if it lived in the world of a sitcom. However, the characters struggle with their past actions as the loop repeats. Everything they do carries over in their memories, and they struggle to reconcile those decisions with how they react to each other in the next loops. As with the best in the genre, the characters realize their actions and preconceptions might have caused the loop, and it takes understanding their flaws to finally work things out.

24 Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week! (2022)

Office Workers Are Caught In An Endless Time Loop

The Japanese time loop movie Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week! takes two fun genres and blends them together. Similar to how Shaun of the Dead equates how the daily work grind creates a lifeless existence similar to a zombie apocalypse, Mondays presents the idea that office workers’ daily and weekly lives are often similar to time loop horrors. In a commentary on the never-ending cycle of work in an office setting, the workers in this movie realize they are literally in a time loop.

Seen as Office Space meets Groundhog Day, when two employees realize they might be living the same weeks over and over again, they start to convince others to break the chain. There is even a funny moment where they have to explain it to their boss with a PowerPoint presentation since he only understands things in business terms. The movie heads in an interesting direction involving Japanese mangas, and the ending is a creative solution not before seen in the genre.

23 Meet Cute (2022)

A Woman Uses A Time Loop To Fix A Bad Date

Meet Cute is a romantic comedy spin on the time loop movies, with Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson in the lead roles. In the film, Sheila meets a man named Gary, who seems perfect for her as he would rather watch movies than sports, and they share other similar likes with a lot in common. However, the date ends up awkward when Sheila tells Gary she has a time machine she found at a nail salon that she uses to relive this same night repeatedly for seven nights in a row.

The movie does take a dark turn when she admits she started using the time machine on a day she was planning to die by suicide because it helped her relive a day when she was happy for the first time in a long time. The story has Gary realize what is happening and he tries to intervene, with possible tragic results. Meet Cute is more of a rom-com than an actual sci-fi movie, and it received lukewarm reviews but has its charms.

22 11.22.63 (2016)

Based On Stephen King’s Time Travel Novel

While not technically a movie, 11.22.62 is a Hulu miniseries that can be viewed as one long film. It follows Jake, a recently divorced English teacher from Maine who learns about a time machine in a local diner.

The diner owner, Al Templeton, explains that he has been using the time machine for years to attempt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John F. Kennedy. There is one problem. The time machine drops a person off at a precise date and time – September 9, 1958. This means he had five years to set up the plan to stop it but the problem is that the person ages in real time.

When they return to the present, they have aged and then when they go back, they hit 1958 again and have to start over. Al has gotten too old and is dying, and Jake agrees to take his place to put the plans in motion. After a few failed attempts, he finally sets out to achieve their plan with unexpected results.

The miniseries won the Saturn Award for Best Television Presentation and it sits at 83% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

21 When We First Met (2018)

A Young Man Tries To Force Love Through A Time Loop

When We First Met was a tough topic from the start, as it has a protagonist in Noah Ashby who wants to use time travel to make a woman fall for him rather than the person she actually fell in love with. Adam DeVine stars as Noah, a guy who learns that he can cause a time loop using a photo booth at a party, and he figures he can manipulate things so that the woman he loves, Avery (Alexandra Daddario), falls in love with him rather than her fiance, Ethan (Robbie Amell). The entire plan is toxic.

However, what makes the movie work is DeVine’s charming personality and the fact that, as he keeps fighting to force his idea of happiness on the world, he realizes that he is not the center of the universe. He needs to let people — including himself — find their own happiness. It is when he realizes this that he sees love has been in front of him the entire time. The film received lower critical reviews, but it remains a lighthearted romantic time loop comedy with fun performances and a big heart.

20 12:PM (1990)

A Short Film Of A Man Stuck In A Time Loop On His Lunch Break

A unique addition to the long list of time loop movies that exist, 12:01pm doesn’t take place over the course of a day or a week. Instead, this short film takes place over the course of a single lunch hour, or more accurately, over 59 minutes. Starring That 70s Show’sKurtwood Smith as Myron Castleman, the movie sees his character start his time loop by standing in the middle of the road when he’s started his lunch break from work.

Myron, fortunately, spends one of the hours of his time loop seeing a news broadcast that details a report of “time bounces,” which is exactly what he finds happening to him, as he’s bounced back to the start of the 59 minutes as soon as it ends. He spends his next time loop chapter trying to find the scientist who predicted the time bounce. It’s an incredibly unique take on a time loop movie that manages not to get too repetitive despite the shorter time frame.

19 The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things (2021)

Teens Who Like Living In A Time Loop

The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things turns the idea of the time loop on its head because it begs the question: why would you want to escape a time loop where you know how everything plays out? That’s the question for Mark (Kyle Allen), a teenager who uses the time loop to slightly change his decisions every day and make himself into a seemingly effortlessly cool individual.

When he meets Margaret (Kathryn Newton), however, his perspective on the time loop changes just a little bit. Instead of making herself cooler to other people, Margaret likes to create “tiny perfect things” within the time loop, moments of everyday beauty that can be missed when people are too busy moving on to the next thing. She finds them or creates them and returns to them again and again. It’s a great and unusual take on a time loop movie.

18 The Incredible Shrinking Wknd (2019)

Each Time Loop Gets Shorter In Time

The Incredible Shrinking Wknd is not the typical time-loop movie. Instead of repeating the same set time over and over, this time loop lessens by an hour every time it repeats. That puts a ticking clock on this time loop, creating tension that makes the audience and the main character wonder just what will happen when the time loop finally ends. When there is no time left, will they blink out of existence, or will something even worse happen?

That main character is Alba (Iria del Rio), who is someone quite literally stuck in a rut in her life when the time loop occurs. She finds herself unsure of where she wants her life to take her as she’s unemployed, living with her father, and heads out with friends to celebrate her 30th birthday. Alba has to find an opportunity to grow even as her chances seem to get shorter and shorter.

17 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

An Anime About A Young Woman Who Creates Her Own Time Loop

This beloved anime isn’t strictly a time loop movie, but it does have a major time loop element in it. The movie is more about time travel as a whole when the main character Makoto Konno (voiced by Riisa Naka) discovers she has the ability to time travel. She uses that ability without thinking about the consequences until she settles on her school days.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time sees the main character relive her school days over and over again, trying to fix her past mistakes. She chooses to loop time and go back and change things instead of necessarily getting stuck in a loop as most other fictional characters do. The narrative here, however, explores the unintended consequences of her changes. The movie highlights how small decisions can have a big impact.

16 Two Distant Strangers (2020)

A Time Loop Short Movie About Police Brutality

Two Distant Strangers is an unusual addition to the time loop selection because it is not a feature-length movie but a short film directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe. The duo teamed up to provide a half-hour movie depicting police brutality and the Black American community.

Joey Bada$$ stars as Carter, a man who has a one-night stand and just wants to get home to his dog the next day. He has an encounter with a police officer that becomes the focal point of a time loop. The thought-provoking short film earned a 2021 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Film and is a great way to use the time loop trope in a modern context. It opens up conversations about racism, abuse of power, and police brutality, all with a very small window of time to tell a story.

15 Christmas Every Day (1996)

A Christmastime Time Loop Movie

Originally based on an 1892 short story about a girl who wishes to have Christmas every day, the story was adapted to match the then-recent hit Groundhog Day when this movie released in 1996. Christmas Every Day revolves around Billy, a selfish teenager who’s forced to relive Christmas every day until he understands its true meaning.

This slightly non-traditional Christmas movie premiered on The Family Channel and has since become a perennial favorite, replaying every Christmas on each iteration of The Family Channel: Fox Family, then ABC Family, and then Freeform. It offers the morality tale of something like A Christmas Carol, but it does so with a slightly different story featuring a ’90s family. The movie actually got a remake in 2006 as then ABC Family created Christmas Do-Over with an adult protagonist instead.

14 Timecrimes (2007)

A Hugely Popular Cult-Favorite Time Loop Movie

In Timecrimes, a man is attacked by a mysterious masked assailant in the woods, leading him to take refuge in a secluded scientific research facility and the realization that he is already caught in the fateful web of an ongoing time loop, where his actions are already predetermined, but he is yet to discover exactly what they will be and why.

Timecrimes is a fascinatingly fun take on both sci-fi and horror concepts that may seem overused but are given a new lease on life here thanks to the time loop movie’s smart plotting and down-to-earth style. It’s unusual to see a time loop concept employed in horror, but there are a handful of horror movies that make the idea their own. While Timecrimes isn’t as well known as some of the others, it’s worth a watch.

13 The Final Girls (2015)

A 1980s Based Slasher Time Loop Movie

The Final Girls takes a unique twist on the time loop genre while also being a satire of the slasher genre. The movie transports a group of high school students into a 1980s slasher movie where they experience the movie’s 92-minute running time repeatedly and have to relive its horrors and murders each time. The Final Girls premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival, and critics praised it for its unique take on the slasher genre, its various tropes, and its clever use of the time loop concept.

Instead of strictly being a morality tale, The Final Girls is focused on the stages of grief. As the group of teens relive the slasher movie over and over, one of them has a particular connection to it: her mother was one of the stars and has since died. It’s an interesting way to approach closure.

12 Before I Fall (2017)

A Young Woman Ends Up In A Time Loop After A Car Crash

Based on the Young Adult book of the same name, Before I Fall stars Zoey Deutch as a popular teenager who starts reliving the same day over and over again following a car crash. Stuck in a time loop, she tries to change her ways and make a difference in the life of a girl she had bullied in the past. Like many time loop movies, the story plays with the idea of how small decisions can make big differences, but it also posits that some things are going to happen no matter what.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was later released to theaters to mixed reviews, with much criticism directed toward its ending, but Zoey Deutch’s performance received high praise. The movie was also nominated for several Teen Choice Awards, winning one.

11 The Endless (2017)

A Partial Sequel To Resolution

The Endless expands on time loop ideas featured in the 2012 movie, Resolution, from directors, producers, and lead actors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Both of the movies feature some of the same characters, but it’s not necessary to see one to understand the other. The story features a signature blend of sci-fi horror and indie dramedy and has an interesting bit of the hand-crafted quality to it (Benson also served as the film’s writer while Moorhead also served as its cinematographer) give it a real personality.

The plot revolves around two brothers who return to an isolated–but largely non-threatening–cult commune that they once belonged to when they were young. Once there, they discover several people trapped in the time loop, which is all for one entity’s amusement. While the setup for all the dark revelations that the two discover is fairly clear-cut, the time loop movie is still engagingly surprising and original throughout.

10 Triangle (2009)

Inspired By The Greek Myth Of Sisyphus

A fun time loop movie that is also a variation on both the ghost ship story and slasher movies, Triangle sees a group of shipwrecked friends take refuge on a creepy old derelict cruise ship with a masked killer on board. Writer and director Christopher Smith was inspired by the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was cursed to repeatedly move a boulder up a mountain, but could never reach the top. The same idea is used in time loop movies that gradually get closer to their conclusion before the loop begins again.

The time loop angle comes into play throughout the movie as characters begin to notice events playing out again, with the identity and motivation of the killer evolving as the story goes along. Fans of twists in horror movies are sure to have a fun time with this amazing cerebral thriller as Triangle‘s time loop plot leads to a twist ending that is clever and unexpected.

9 Primer (2004)

Shane Carruth’s Debut Time Travel Masterpiece

A micro-budgeted masterpiece, Shane Carruth’s debut movie Primer is one of the few science-fiction movies that focuses just as much on science as it does on fiction and one of an even smaller number that does it very well. The plot follows two aspiring inventors who accidentally discover time travel and, as much as that sounds like a setup for comedic hijinks, the realistic nature of the theoretical science employed leads to some very real problems for the two.

It’s a fascinating watch for genre fans and provides perhaps the most hypothetically accurate time loop movie ever made. Much of that is likely due to Carruth having so much creative control over the movie. Carruth isn’t just the writer and director, but also producer, editor, and even the one who wrote the movie’s musical score.

8 Boss Level (2021)

A Video Game-Inspired Time Loop Movie

As the title suggests, Boss Level is inspired by the gleeful destruction of video games, particularly retro shoot ’em-ups. The movie almost didn’t get made. Originally developed in 2012 for 20th Century Fox, it didn’t move forward with the studio. It took until 2017 for a creative team to get the movie back on track to film in 2018.

The plot follows Frank Grillo’s gruff and down-on-his-luck hero as they fight through an endless repeat of a day filled with nothing but well-trained and well-armed assassins trying to kill him, and it exploits almost every opportunity for an action scene. It’s not all car chases and explosions, however. The movie sticks close to the core credo of self-betterment through repetition, with Grillo’s lousy husband/absent father taking the opportunity to reflect on his life in all the carnage of the time loop movie.

7 Predestination (2014)

A Time Traveling Agent Tries To Catch A Criminal

This relatively small-scale Australian sci-fi movie was adapted from Robert Heinlein’s complex short story “–All You Zombies–” and wasn’t a big box office draw on release. Nevertheless, it quickly developed a loving fanbase that has rated it among the best time loop movies ever. Featuring a time-traveling agent that is trapped in a paradoxical game of cat and mouse with a bomber, Predestination is really a much more philosophical sci-fi movie than most and explores the theoretical concepts at the heart of the time loop idea to their fullest extent.

Much more than a morality play, Predestination examines the idea of using time travel to prevent bad acts and how that may or may not work. It also examines issues surrounding identity – whether it is crafted or predetermined, making for one of the most fascinating time loop movies.

6 Source Code (2011)

A Military Man Tries To Find A Terrorist By Reliving A Tragedy

Directed by Duncan Jones, Source Code tells the story of an army pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is sent into the body of a deceased train passenger through whom he must relive the eight minutes leading up to the detonation of a bomb that destroys the train. Beyond the time loop angle, the movie also broaches the subject of alternate timelines created by the loops, something not often considered in the subgenre.

The movie is a taut thriller that’s full of twists and turns as it relies on the protagonist not fully understanding how he was dropped into his predicament in the first place. It is another solid addition to Jake Gyllenhaal’s filmography and he gives an excellent performance. It’s a grippingly stylish take on the time loop movie idea, with the 8-minute window keeping the story moving along–quite fittingly–like a locomotive.