Jagged Mind

The whole idea of making a movie using an "X meets Y" or "X but under Y circumstances" formula is for it to be shorthand for a bigger concept. You don't just say "Die Hard on a bus" or "Friday the 13th meets Last Action Hero" and stop there. Those aren't movies, those are pitches. Jagged Mind said "Groundhog Day as a horror movie made by Lifetime" and stopped there, and it shows in every minute. That's no fault of the actors, who are trying their best to give this thing some life, but it is a futile effort. Jagged Mind never tries to escape being the sum of its parts. I can elaborate further and say "a woman is caught in a time-loop by her manipulative, abusive girlfriend because she wants the perfect relationship", but I don't need to go any further. The movie sure as hell doesn't. Everything you could possibly imagine from that description happens, and that's not exactly a bone with a meal's worth of meat. By 30 minutes in, it has established its characters and repeatedly underscored their traits more times than I can count, but it's gonna beat that drum until it puts the sticks through the drum head, because it wasn't built to do anything else. It's a shame, because "someone awful weaponizes Groundhog Day" is a concept with legs, especially adding in the mechanic that each reset contributes to the mental deterioration of its victim. The hallucinatory editing does a great job of giving the viewing as much disorientation as the main character. But it wastes the concept and the actors, and given that this movie was written and directed by women, and portrays a same-sex relationship without turning that into a plot point, it hurts to see the idea be little more than a logline. Perhaps the writer and director could've reset the day a few times and fixed what was broken.